


steroid drips and old religions

by nowsaguaro



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, F/F, First Kiss, First Time, Fluff and Angst, M/M, Medium Burn, Road Trips, Storms, Will is quippier because he interrupts the downward spiral, mlm & wlw solidarity
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-04
Updated: 2021-03-07
Packaged: 2021-03-16 11:54:50
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 11
Words: 42,478
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29206950
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nowsaguaro/pseuds/nowsaguaro
Summary: *Will has a dog sitter/chill friend who suggests he get another scan.Where it all goes from there.--Plot prose, while the communications are a mix of mostly conversations, texts, letters, and internal stuff.You won't cry & you might laugh.Almost complete, frequent updates, around 50k
Relationships: Will Graham/Hannibal Lecter
Comments: 86
Kudos: 117





	1. 90 Minute IPA

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Will of this story has an implied longer history and deeper familiarity with the monster on his back. The way this comes out in the story just affects how introspective he is and how much he can stomach. He is the same man, has done and not done the same things, and there is still a progression of his own acceptance.

.

.

.

He liked Sam. Not as a companion, just. As a space-sharer, someone for a clever rattle of charming small talk without all those warily concerned undertones that cobwebbed him to the other people in his life. She’d started looking after his dogs about three months ago, occasionally lingering for a night cap. Sam herself had her own – four runty gray pit bulls – who she lugged over one afternoon. (They acknowledged how comically stressful it was to watch all 11 dogs tussling in the leaves.) (She didn’t bring them again.)

Occasionally, Sam would (almost affectionately) complain about all the late nights she was losing to her doctorate and, much to Will’s pleasure, she seemed to have zero interest in grilling him on his bleak profession. They both enjoyed IPA's and the quiet and didn’t feel any sort of obligation to deep social bonding. It was… easy. He paid her well and, because it was a long drive from D.C, he eventually made a place for her upstairs to crash when she had to.

Sam made a joke once that she felt like a ghost haunting his attic. 

After a time, they started meeting up in D.C. near her place for more of their calmly mechanical conversation and deadpan humor at the local bars. He usually timed it to break up the drive back to Wolf Trap from Baltimore. It wasn’t ever with any expectation, seeing as Sam was fully in her doctorate-induced sex-less isolation and was only 31 and Will was in his Will-induced resistance to everything. But she made him laugh and she cared about his dogs.

So they drank and ate fries a few times a month.

  
  


\----***----

Everything else was hard. Everything and everyone that touched Quantico joined a petri dish of something gray and growing.

Years into his job now, he still felt worlds away from it all. Behind glass, watching everyone shake with their own brand of quick-minded agitation. It followed him home, into his dreams, into his lamplight fixations – one thousand minds all settled snugly among his own neurons to tug him like a marionette. 

They always had, really. But this wasn’t him at 17, unintentionally cataloguing the facial tics of self-conscious newlyweds or the raw nose of the man who swears he’s without vices. No, the party trick was his walking through scenes pathologically artful enough to stump the FBI. Walking through them in the mind of the people who flayed skin, who felt compelled to pull out fingernails, to cook with human fat. _[Why would I cut her hair first? Why would I stage a drowning?]_ Whatever bimonthly hell that cloaked him, currently it was a four-state trafficking ring.

If asked by a layman, he’d say his job was to rationalize the supposedly irrational. Some arbitrary system _[fear, sin, and other conspiracies?]_ decided hurting someone was ‘irrational’ although everyone seemed to do it. Will wondered why he seemed to be the only person who could imagine these people’s childhoods and the jobs they hated. No choice but to allow them their space in his catalogue next to every other person he’d become over the years. 

His talks with Dr. Lecter were refreshing albeit tainted with calculation. He was allowed his monopoly on bitterness while given a language of literature and metaphor to sift through all the bleak around him.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  


And then he began to lose time. _[Dissociation, maybe? Under stress, developing chemical dependence, losing sleep - and probably severely depressed if you’re honest]._ It made sense. But he felt more than just visited by these lives. He knew he was hearing things, as if he wasn’t hyper-tuned to the world enough, he had to now fold in a second one. He considered telling Sam, _now I really am haunted._ But that’s not such a funny joke.

\----***----

[10:49AM] Will, I know it’s terribly last minute, but I wonder if you’d like to join Alana and I for dinner this evening.

[10:50AM] I’ve considered asking you to join me as well in visiting Abigail tomorrow afternoon. If you haven’t grown too socially fatigued before then.

**[11:01AM] Dinner no thanks. Abigail sure**

_/Incoming call: dr. Lecter *t he psych/_

“... yes?” Will panned, eyes rolling.

“Hello, Will. I’m calling to coordinate our visit to the hospital tomorrow. As well as in an effort to change your mind about dinner.”

“I’m not sure I’d enjoy dinner with the woman I made a pass at and my psychiatrist who’s monitoring the same instability she cited in her rejection. I think my hesitation on the invitation is sanity.” He ended with a small laugh.

“When laid out in that way, yes, that sounds unappealing.”

Will wasn’t quite sure how to transition out of that. “So, tomorrow?”

“I thought we might smuggle in donuts or other ill-advised treats.”

“Dunkin’ or homemade?”

“The first one, I think. It might be best for Abigail to be precisely aware of the source of the ingredients.”

“That’s a very surprising thing for you to acknowledge, doctor.”

“She’s not my patient. It would be inappropriate if I attempted an exposure therapy, of sorts.”

Will nodded despite being unseen. “So should I meet you at yours? I’d have to pass through your part of Maryland anyway. I hate the bridge.”

“I was thinking the same thing. It’s under construction I believe.”

“Always is.”

After a moment, Will dragged his feet into his own self-prescribed exposure therapy:

“Okay, I’ll come tonight.”

“I’m glad to hear it. I enjoy your company.”

“Nice tactics. Convincing.” He nodded jaggedly again.

“All kindnesses are a form of manipulation.”

“Seven?”

“Yes, seven. And Will,”

“What?”

“Please wear a button up.”

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


When Hannibal took Will’s coat, he gazed down at the dark denim shirt. 

“I _do_ find your obstinance bold and endearing,” facetiously grimacing at Will’s clothing. Some part of the cabin chic attire smelled like a campfire and they both knew it.

“It has buttons.” They shared a smirk when he pointedly tugged his hem. “Where’s Alana?” 

The doctor remembered to lead him into the kitchen. “She will be arriving around 7:30.”

“Did you stagger our invitation times on purpose?” Will quirked a brow. 

“I didn’t want to correct your assumption after you were already reluctant to come.” The older man pursed his lips, his eyes admitting a little truth to the accusation.

“And yet you were comfortable enough to police my clothing.”

“Knowing you’d be comfortable enough to disregard any suggestion. Shall I get you something to drink?”

  
  
  
  
  
  


They stood in the kitchen, Will watching the finishing touches on dinner, both promising each other they’d stop at the bottom of this glass before food was served.

“I’d like to know more about your beginnings.” Hannibal looked up from the cutting board, “what can you tell me?”

The younger man sighed at the ceiling. “Well, as you know, I grew up in places where God drops his pencil shavings.”

“I know your young life was not all shadows and squalor, William. What is a moment that made you this man? One of your yellow-green memories that repeats behind your eyes?”

“Hmm,” _[okay]_ “sometimes I think of my uncle’s kitchen. All overrun with fruit flies. When I could barely see over the counter.”

“And what happened there?”

“Nothing so imprinting,” he lied. “What makes you so sure of my _‘beginnings’_?”

“You know how to show affection,” Hannibal answered quickly and smiled to himself when he saw Will wince at the reminder that Alana was coming over soon, “and you know what brings you joy.” 

Will nodded. “Both can be purely learned in resilience.”

“Even in the years you raised yourself, you knew what sustains a person. A natural gift?”

“No, not completely. Daddy raised me enough,” he inflected with a little Southern twang as a joke. “I just… learned to fill my life with enough of the right things.”

“‘Right’?”

A sigh. “I had a temper. Quiet about it, though. Saw too much. Wanted too much.”

“Past tense.” The doctor smirked with implication.

 _“Have_ a temper,” he conceded, vapor-trailing: _[see too much, want too much]._ “Always hyper-aware of every inch of my difference. Plus, coupled with the teen angst I was not half the magnanimous life of the party I am today.”

“Whatever you did or did not get – every heartache, friendly stray. I am glad for them. Even your pain.” The sincerity was too warm. Possibly the wine. 

“That might be an awful thing to say, but it depends on if that’s where your speech ends.”

The older man actually chuckled before responding, “rather selfishly, I owe a gratitude to whatever events in your life brought you here to my kitchen.”

Will moved his eyes around the kitchen. “I should tell you, I don’t know how to take compliments.”

“Try your hardest to avoid responding with self-deprecation.”

  
  


Will squinted with a smile, partially hiding behind his glass. “And you? Things in particular that left you so…” his wine-loosened lips took over, “stony and hedonistic?” _[a late December blizzard. Welcome and probably hazardous.]_

“ _Of this world a family mansion. Of the next a family tomb_ ,” Hannibal quoted, trying to look unaffected.

“Everyone?”

“I experienced losses in many ways by an early age. Theft, starvation. Deprivation, instability, my own silence,” he may have punctuated the honesty with a harder knife slide along the celery stalks. “As a result, I learned many forms of enrichment and use them still today. As much by principle as it is indulgence, I assure you.”

“So _you_ were learned through resilience. What did you… do?”

“A topic for another day, I think.” Probably uncharacteristically for an expert in the kitchen, the man swiveled his blade to indicate the finality.

They stood comfortably just in the whispers of tearing cilantro and their soft moving fabric for a moment.

At the sound of a well (or poorly) timed knock at the front door, Hannibal left Will in the kitchen to overhear a muffled volley of things along the lines of you-look-lovely and thank-you-for-having-me. The familiar tone over the refrain unsettled Will, his comfort in the home wilting quickly. _[Everyone seems skilled in having what you don’t. You resent all revelations that tell you that you want it.]_

“Will, hello.”

“Hi, Alana.”

He was well aware she didn’t deserve his venom. His bitterness should be swallowed and forgotten. For all of her small humiliating observations, all she did was look out for him and for herself. He could respect that. He could envy that. 

After wine was poured – Hannibal and Will silently vowing to keep their alcoholic appetizers a secret – food set and raved about, the evening settled into a reasonable level of comfort. Not a bad meeting of the minds, really.

Alana spoke while reaching for her glass, “Abigail is looking at schools.”

“Far away from the Midwest, I should think.” Hannibal didn’t look up.

“Yes. She mentioned Toronto, actually.”

Will chimed in. “Probably not a great idea to leave the country so soon, considering the federal obsession with her case.”

“She also is looking at the south. Tampa. Tulane. You might be able to show her around, Will.”

“If she warms to me, I’d like that.”

“She’s going to take some time off before making any big decisions, probably try to start with summer classes. So there will be plenty of opportunities to warm.”

“Will and I are planning to visit her tomorrow.”

“She’ll like that. It isn’t always therapeutic for her to be surrounded by girls her age, I’m gathering.”

Instead of voicing his reactionary _[that’s what she’s been saying all along]_ , Will smirked and they settled into silence. He realized the room might have been waiting for just that. 

Hannibal, always the host, carried the conversation safely into neutral topics, refilling his and Will’s water glasses from the chilled carafe. 

  
  
  
  


After the forks were all settled on emptied plates, the host broke through gentle chatter. “Will, could you help me in the kitchen? I do hate to recruit my guests, but I’ve forgotten to peel the clementines for dessert.”

Will nodded and followed him to the opening refrigerator, where three fully plated and zest-dusted dishes were waiting. Pretense evaporated. “So, what did you want to talk to me about?”

“Will, I wonder if you’d stay a while later after dinner. I’d like to discuss something with you.”

He frowned. “How unnervingly vague, doctor.”

“It’s nothing so ominous,” the man quipped, accompanied by a somehow wink-less wink. “I’d also like to make sure you eat enough to soak up your belly full of spirits before driving.”

“Okay.” Will really was in no position at all (he was still feeling a high quality buzz) to argue with that. 

“Good. I thought I was going to have to out us as drunkards to Alana.”

  
  


The pair definitely didn’t wait long enough before returning to the dining room to pretend they had been fiddling with clementines, but it was an unsubtle exit in the first place.

  
  
  


Only 45 minutes later, Alana was tucking her scarf into her coat, collecting tiny hints of information to be used in the future for full conclusions about Will’s staying behind, but she graciously left alone after her socially talented see-you-both-soon and tell-me-how-tomorrow-goes. 

  
  
  
  
  
  


“About the memory in my uncle’s house. Once, when I was 6 or 7, I saw a man on his tiny black and white TV. Volume was down low but I could pick out that he was a reverend. It was a local station, so, a Baptist. Some sermon on brimstone and other promises.” Will paused while he handed the doctor the cloth napkins for the hamper. “Naturally, my uncle warned me of the inevitability of my damnation if I didn’t repent before it was too late. I wondered what he saw in me then that needed repent.”

“There are, after all, many avenues to damnation,” the doctor responded while guessing where this was headed.

“Yeah, well, by 25, I figured maybe he saw nothing at all. Just tried to sow seeds of self-doubt so I didn’t trust myself enough to escape my roots.”

Hannibal hummed, stacked the dishwasher. “In those decades when you wondered, what were a few of your guesses?”

“Well, I was all kinds of different. Internally, socially. Could’ve been his coding my difference as a foreboding for un-Christian evils.” He ended in a grimacing laugh.

“Certainly brimstone is a powerful deterrent for, what? Crushes on your classmates or special criminal curiosities?”

“Among other unholy things.”

“Were you more _ashamed_ or more _afraid_ of your wicked impulses?”

“I thought you’d know by the, well, _implied_ badge that my criminal curiosities extended into catching them.”

At that, the older man finally made eye contact. “Consider how you catch them.”

A long shuffling lull.

“So, can you reveal any part of your story after the tombs and silence?”

They were both chugging water now. _[Wine hangover. Definitely gonna have alcohol for breakfast.]_

“We do what we can to benefit our souls. I did whatever I could. I don’t let the memories have fangs anymore.”

“I wish I had that power over any of my thoughts.” Will heartily sighed. 

“Will, I am beyond the point of simple concern for your mental well-being. That’s why I asked you after.”

 _[But you said it wasn’t ominous.]_ He didn’t say that.

“I will arrange an MRI with a colleague but, if we find nothing, we have to move forward with your treatment of the psychological.”

  
  


The conversation wound down soon after. Whatever friendship-mimicking mood they had been playing with earlier in the night was long gone. For one of them at least.

Hannibal pointedly tightened the other’s coat to hide the offensive denim. “If only you lived in Baltimore, this all would be a lot easier.

“I don’t mind driving.”

The doctor put his hand on the door frame to frame his goodbye. “If only you minded driving.”

Will squinted skeptically at the every-kindness-is-manipulation before responding. “See you tomorrow, Dr. Lecter.”

“Goodbye, Will.” 

  
  


\----***----

The discovery that he had nothing neurologically wrong with him was worse news than it should have been. He’d truly become the thing they locked away, the joke of medical circles - and was spiraling towards a horridly punny headline for Freddie Lounds to color her homepage with. For weeks, he so desperately wanted to see a low res CT scan printout of a silent stroke’s bright tissue line or to be handed a DVD of some glittering fMRI of a treatable infection. But, instead, he saw this sick joke: black and white evidence of his perfectly shaped hydrated-tissued very not plagued neurology.

It was official after all those weeks _[months?]_ that he walked through the cautious but impatient gaze of his coworkers and, with increasing frequency, dragged him back here, to the patronizing, stifling air of Dr. Lecter’s office. The man himself brought with him none of the stilted charm he managed at his home. The office always smelled like dark oak and worn books, occasionally of extinguished fires. Still, somehow, it had a chill about it, maybe it was the nighttime and the ever-present rain. Maybe that well-practiced lack of affect performed by the doctor. 

  
  


“Don’t you have a thinly veiled ‘I told you so’ speech locked and loaded? Let it loose.”

“On the contrary, Will. I am, after quite a bit of schooling, a psychiatrist and always mourn the conveniences of prescribing medication.”

Will rolled his eyes with a firm grip on the arm rests. “Love putting pen to paper on someone.”

“That I do.” His face crinkled with a smirk. “Unfortunately, our work together will necessitate more than exploring your cases. I’d like to learn more about you. And explore the nature of your hallucinations.”

“So, do we have to begin tonight? Or can I marinate for a week in self pity and fever dreams first?”

“We can cut the evening short. But I want to return to your story with your uncle. I’m sure you are aware that I pick up on half-truths.”

  
  


\----***----

He sat, ruddy-faced across from Sam. Funny how winter burns the cheeks, too. Will knew, eventually, with his increasingly un-disguisable decline, he’d have to add some grim reality to their banter. It was less waiting to be revealed and more waiting to be addressed.

Sam, though very in her element behind the beer bottle, was obviously pacing herself tonight. “ _To be ill adjusted to a deranged world is not a breakdown._ ”

“Of _course_ you read Winterson.” Will leaned back, theatrically rolling his eyes. 

“Of course _you_ read Winterson,” she pointed at him as though she caught him on naughty sites. 

Will lifted the bottle for a second before setting it back down and speaking again. “I don’t know. There’s something about the fevers… I have trouble believing they’re unrelated to infection. Or I don’t want to yet.”

“What are you running? Or, rather, what’s the hottest they’ve gotten?” Sam not so discreetly checked the time on her phone. Impromptu meetups weren’t very compatible with her lifestyle.

“I’m not sure about the hottest. I’ve… been losing time. Hallucinating.”

“Hmm… neurology lecture back in pre-med, we spent a while discussing inflammation. I _will_ say, people with PTSD can suffer from fevers, so it’s not to say a psychological basis is impossible, but you should get a second opinion.”

“There were two fairly esteemed doctors looking at the scan. It _came_ with a second opinion.”

“Third opinion. Sometimes these doctors spend so long in one profession, like, too long in the physiological that they forget behavioral diagnostics, or too long in behavior - they forget their physiology lens.” She paused. “What?”

He smiled brightly. “Listen to you. Granola-next-door on your way to medicate the world. I’m proud.”

“Well, look at _you_ , Graham. No one would guess that your _retired-boy-band-member-looking sweaty ass_ is walking around psychoanalyzing killers.” She took a swig of her beer. “If you swapped out your dogs for cats, I would’ve thought you were one yourself.”

He went a little quiet, trying to decide which allegation he found the most offensive. “Well… here’s to being dog people.”

They clinked their bottles.

  
  
  
  
  


He scheduled an appointment with Georgetown's diagnostic radiology department for that Friday morning, his best chance at going unmissed at Quantico in case he was taken inpatient for a few days. That was also the biggest window he could go without being sought out by Dr. Lecter. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the line about "of course you read Winterson." is in reference to the author Jeanette Winterson. A heterosexual does not read Winterson. This is the modern lit nerd equivalent of running into a coworker at a gay bar.


	2. Maurice

“They’re keeping me in this green polyester robe. I thought I’d be getting the kind that’s open in the back.” Will sat on the edge of his patient bed, exposed hairy legs hanging over. 

“What, you wanna give the nurse’s station a show?” 

He shrugged with a sarcastic frown. “It’s nice to let it all breathe from time to time. I look like I threw this on to cover up on the way to the mailbox.”

Sam pinched the edge of the fabric. “Well, as far as hospital gowns go, they are rolling out the red carpet for you.” 

He smiled, flicking the back of the pen nervously on the plastic clipboard. It was pretty obvious which parts of the form were giving him hang ups.

Sam swooped in before he could wallow, “I know this is a bit sudden but, Will Graham, would you like to be each other’s emergency contacts?”

He pursed his lips and gave a small nod. It was nice to not have to ask, but also a little embarrassing to recognize that the older he got, the fewer people he had. At least he found someone else unashamedly without deep blood ties or a live-in partner.

At his glazed drift, she added, “obviously, I’m already the implied godfather to your children… plus I have your address memorized, which is a level of intimacy I reserve for my childhood home and my friend Carla. Only because I drop my boys at her house sometimes.”

“My dog sitter’s dog sitter. We’re learning so much about each other.”

She smiled softly. “Yeah, well, if only your gown was open in the back.”

A weighty pause.

Sensing the uncharted waters as well, he interrupted the silence. “Okay, so while my results gather dust in the diagnostic radiology department, did you wanna go back to the library or home or something? I can manage sitting in silence.”

“That’s okay. For my mental health I should let some of my own papers gather dust, too. Did I lose you with my jargon, there? Talking about doing things for one’s _ ‘mental health’ _ ?”

He’d give that one to her. That was fair. “I think I followed.”

“Actually, though, I might be able to move the process along downstairs. Finesse.”

“Going to tell them I’m an important member of the FBI?”

“Hmm. I was thinking of flashing Maurice some clavicle.”

Will’s eyebrows shot up then scrunched down. “His name is definitely not Maurice.”

Sam disappeared around the door.

  
  


_ [Okay, I’ll just be here breathing.] _

  
  


\----***----

“So, Mr. Graham. From your panel and the MRI, I’m confident that you in fact have anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis.”

“‘Anti-NMDA receptor’... so it’s autoimmune?” He wanted to ask if a brain infection meant he had to get a spinal tap but they were probably beyond that point. He shivered at the thought regardless.

“It is an autoimmune disease, yes. You’re lucky we caught it when we did. I believe another few weeks and the progression could have led to irreparable damage. It is unaffiliated with a growth or scarring, luckily, so it will just call for some fluid and steroid monitoring for a few days, followed by a nice take-home prize with your name on it.”

It was obvious this doctor was formerly in pediatrics.

Sam chimed in, “I saw the scan downstairs. The diagnostician who gave you your last results must’ve been looking at the wrong one or something.”

“Or was a baby,” the doctor laughed. 

_ [Okay, so they already bantered on the way here.] _

“Yeah, it lit up like a black light in a motel room. I’m surprised you have your fine motor control.”

Will huffed to himself, pretty confused. Days ago, two reputable doctors together in a room surveying a live scan missed a brain with that level of inflammation? Did they… no, there were only absurd scenarios that could explain this as a mistake. There were  _ no _ scenarios, in fact. But what were the scenarios that explained this as… deliberate?

Sam lost her smile when the doctor left the room and she sat at the end of his bed. “How do you feel?”

“I’m… not sure.” _ [Confused, angry, something else, and something else.] _

“Relieved? Just fluids and then some pills. That’s it. And I will obviously watch the little ones.” She put her hand on his shoulder. It felt appropriately hollow and out of place for them. “Also, his name was Martin. The tech downstairs, his name was not Maurice. So, you were right about  _ two _ things. The Bureau is lucky to have you.”

“Oh, well then I’m definitely riding a high right now, thank you.” He laughed at the ceiling. Will was very, very glad Sam – and no one else – was here.

“I’m sorry they couldn’t do more, y’know, about the other thing.”

He stared at her quivering mouth, sensing in his bones she was about to make fun of him. 

“Y’know, your skinny little legs.”

Before he had a chance to scrounge together a grumpy response, a nurse wheeled in a drip and some consent forms to get him set to be moved into an inpatient room. Sam took that as her cue to leave. “I’ll prolly head straight to your place and get comfortable.”

He looked up from the nurse’s work on the bend in his arm to offer the best portrayal of sincere gratitude he was capable of given the circumstances. “Thank you for everything, Sam. Really.”

  
  


With his only buoy of comfort now out of his sight, the seething rage began.

  
  
  


\----***----

  
  


“Hi there. Can I help you?”

“Hi, um,” Alana’s first impulse at seeing a young and beautiful woman answering Will’s door was the acute and very unfair desire to ask  _ who the hell are you?  _ But she stopped herself. “Is Will home?”

The woman who answered the door was rumpled in a very Wolf Trap way. Her dark hair sat, almost cartoonishly, right on top of her head in a bun, a few wisps coming down to catch in her eyelashes. Definitely woke up here and not that long ago. She appeared annoyingly at home.

“No, he’s out.” Sam imagined that was the right amount of vague to offer up. “But I’ll let you come in if you can name two of his dogs.”

Alana blinked away her own inappropriate jealousy at the familiarity, unfortunately gathering that this stranger was, in fact, very kind. “Right, so I was right in assuming he didn’t go out and buy a used Honda Civic this weekend? And yes, um, Max and Zoe.”

“Entry granted,” she deadpanned. Sounded familiar enough. “I’m Sam. Like the toucan.”

Alana literally sighed at how charming this person was. “Alana,” she smiled brightly back and took the swinging door as an invitation despite the now vanished host. 

  
  
  


Sam called from the fridge (while Alana took off her shoes and kneeled to pet the excited rush of heavy-breathing and wiggling animals), “Graham said I could help myself to some of his beers while he was out, so would you like to partake? It’s almost noon but we can pretend the clock is slow.” She winked when she peeked her head out to look at Alana, who was headed toward the kitchen as well.

Her eyebrows raised with playful suspicion. “Will gave you free reins on his alcohol?”

“He said it with his eyes,” Sam smiled mischievously. “You said ‘Alana’? Taking on his lectures tomorrow, right?” She grunted while she cracked open the second Dogfish Head on the edge of the counter. 

“That’s me.” She gratefully accepted the smoking bottle and watched the phone on the counter light up silently.

Sam followed her eye line to her Samsung.

**[11:56AM] They’re letting me keep the robe. You want dibs?**

He’s bored. She smiled, quickly typing out:

_ [11:56AM] No no. Save it for your wedding day. _

Sam looked up. “Do you want me to let him know you’re here?”

Alana almost wanted to say no and slink out of this barricaded attempt at bridge building. Instead, in an effort to not appear erratic, she softly shrugged. “Yes, sure.”

Sam lifted the phone to snap a picture of a surprised, mid-motion Alana to send to Will.

_ [11:58AM] \image198.\ whats her deal? ~ _

**[11:58AM] Lectures at GU. I’m not entirely clear on the ethical lines? ok going to sleep now**

“You wanna sit in the living room?” Sam narrowly avoided the impulse to start a fire and all the presumptive implications, but curled up welcomingly on the couch. She wasn’t super familiar with the interdepartmental ethical lines, either. But she also wasn’t super concerned with the interdepartmental ethical lines.

“He says you are a professor at Georgetown?”

Alana gazed down at her socked feet while she tugged off her coat and scarf, setting them on the door hook. “Did Will just provide you with some detached profile of me?  _ ‘Mid-thirties, female, white American, slender, approximately 5’3”. Unsub will be in academia’ _ .”

“Nice to meet you,” Sam mimed reading off a police pad, “‘ _ Female, presumably late twenties early thirties, of Middle Eastern or Latin American descent. Believed to use humor to compensate for being flat-chested _ .”

They both giggled softly, stilling to survey one another.

Okay, fine, this was clearly his dog sitter and Alana was officially charmed (and briefly wondered if it was possible for Sam to leave someone with anything but a good impression). “Approach carefully, suspect will be covered in dog hair.”

Sam flicked her eyes down. Her gray shirt was, truly,  _ covered _ in hair in a variety of lengths and colors. Beyond help. “Though, Graham saves his profiler voice for work. I’ve actually never heard him talk like that.” The Will Graham she knows, she realized, is not really a person she has a full picture of.  _ Professor. In high demand. In therapy. Hermit and mostly content with it. Autoimmune disease. Probably aware of how attractive he is but doesn’t care. Willing to pay for a dog sitter while he’s still in the house. Coworkers familiar enough with him to drop in unannounced and allude to his alcoholism.  _ She clipped the mental run to break the moment’s static, “nah, he - I sent him that mediocre picture of you,” she laughed behind the lip of the bottle, “and he warned me that you were a professor at Georgetown. I’m pursuing my doctorate there.”

“‘Warned’ you?” Alana realized she was still standing and took up a spot on the couch, which then invited the dogs to weave in between and around the two of them.

Sam let them and popped her lips. “He isn’t familiar with the ethical lines.”

.

.*

\----***----

.*

.

_ [8:41PM] How would you feel if I had sex in your house? Thoughts? Hesitations? (I just had sex in your house) _

Will sucked his teeth and made an explosion noise to himself, opting to accept that his warmly clinical relationship with his colleague was painted with  _ “don’t do that”  _ from the start. He was fully aware he and Alana were never made of the same stuff. He mourned that image of his potential future for just a moment and waited for jealousy that didn’t come. Other emotions with varying levels of rationality rattled through him, too: not wanting to complicate his relationship with his dog sitter. Not wanting to create chainlinks between his social spheres. Relieved that Alana’s eyes were distracted away from… the rest of his life. 

**[8:43PM] Smoke your post-coital cigarettes outside please.**

  
  


His steroid treatment itself didn’t knock him out, but his restoration took all of his energy. He closed his eyes and drifted off again. And slept until morning.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  


He woke up feeling desperately wrung out. There were several reasons for his body to stop feeling like home, but this one was the loudest. Now made sickly in a way far too clumsy to be a place with a deed. It is a  _ house _ , maybe, but only in the sense that there was a door he knew the second he walked out of it.  A wide open door letting all the wrong ones run their fingers along his life. ( _ His _ now that he served to be its shadow. Always curved along the ground behind its architecture, dragged by the daytime.) With Dr. Lecter now perched on the roof less like a gargoyle and more like a lightning rod.

_ [I am not built with wellness in mind. Am I a ‘someone’ without the inhabitants?]  _

  
  
  


“Graham, Will?” The nurse broke his trance. “We can get you out tonight, maybe. This is day four?”

“Uh, four, yeah.”  _ [Jesus Christ.] _

“Well, I will escort you to the hospital pharmacy before you sign out after the doctor checks in with you. I printed out a treatment plan, but he’ll go over it in more depth. Would you like to sort out your bill payments downstairs or wait ‘til you’re snug at home?”

He considered the various ways his insurance use could get back to the Bureau. The answer is,  _ only if they’re looking _ , but he leaned on the side of paranoid and offered to sort the paperwork at home. He was already paranoid enough to avoid treatment at Sibley Memorial lest he run into a Johns Hopkins grapevine.

  
  


\----***----

_ /Dialing: Samina Q.  _ 🐶 _ / _

“Hey, there, tiger. You out?”

At Will’s inability to find a response, Sam continued, “are we not nickname people? Fine.” Her voice was definitely pushed through a smile. Trying to fluster him.

“Yeah, yes, I’m out. About to head home.”

“Glad you’re okay, Will. You remembered to go trick-or-treating before you left, right?” A concern took over her tone. Maybe the spheres of his life were already chain-linking if she was afraid for him.

“If you’re referring to stopping at the  _ pharmacy _ , yes, I have plenty of candy to last me... champ.” He rolled his eyes while it left his mouth.

“Yeah, we’re not nickname people. See you soon.”

  
  
  


That night Will drove home to his very excited pack, happy to write a generous check to Sam. He let her peel out of there before their conversation headed in an uncomfortable direction. He wanted to not feel stale as soon as possible and he was certainly not looking for more details on what happened with Alana. Eventually, though. Because of course he was  _ deeply _ curious about how anything in his life led to his colleague sleeping with his dog sitter in  _ his _ home while he spent his weekend convincing the nurses of each shift that he didn’t need a catheter and yes he’s sure. 

  
  


He showered and changed into clean sleepwear, glad to finally move around without a film of plastic smell and sterile air. He unloaded his new orange pill bottles to sit onto the bedside table with a little sour irritation; it was becoming quite the vibrant and varied collection. Will flopped on his stomach in the center of his bed, letting his dogs climb up and sniff all around him. Something his skin remembered better than he did. He basked in the feeling of all their noses poking at him for a moment and fell into a slow paced dream that meant nothing.

Gray skies and returns home as medicine for every sort of ache. Rest for the eyes now, rest for the head now.

  
  


* * *

  
  
  


Will began as soon as he entered the office at their next appointment.

“You want to know what I’ve done, Hannibal?”

The doctor eyed him from his rigid position with cautious confusion. “Will, while I welcome the familiarity, I’m curious as to why you’ve so abruptly stripped me of my title.”

He watched him, his calculating poise so snakelike that Will almost expected the man’s eyes to cloud over.

Will turned away and ran his fingers along the shelves, feeling as though he was seeing this place for the first time. “I got an MRI.”

“And?”

“It’s funny, you’re so deeply and delusionally self-assured with your malpractice that you feel comfortable enough to act lost when confronted.”

“I know precisely what you must have found.” He smoothed his pant leg. “So I suppose I am wondering what you’ve brought in retribution.”

“This isn’t malpractice like a misplaced decimal point. You were comfortable with my potential death.” His voice was starting to shake.

“That wasn’t at all–”

“Psychiatrists are the diagnosticians of the behavioral world.”

“But, as your therapist, I chose to guide you to self-discovery.”

“I  _ ‘self-discovered’ _ an autoimmune disease.” Will was tasting dimes.

Hannibal stood and stepped towards him. “Brain inflammation was making frantic the elements in you. Opening the mouth for a voice you worked so hard to mute in all your years of lucidity.”

“You decided for me that I can’t live muted? People do it successfully all the time.”

The doctor’s eyes, aggravatingly, were half-lidded and unimpressed. “And they bask in their blended together days of mediocrity. You weren’t simply inhibited. I saw a man encumbered.”

“But you weren't breaking me to make room for joy. You wanted to make me desperate for your help, malleable in your hands,” Will was nearly spitting through his grimace.

  
  


“It’s what a doctor does. Tells you what troubles you.”

“And you’re suggesting that was your goal? I was already barely holding onto my self concept and you tried to take even that.” Will looked up at the ceiling with a sad smile, “I spent a lifetime convinced survival alone was an achievement.”

“Is it not? It reeks of a simpler truth: most of us do our best to keep our hearts beating.”

“I didn’t slip out of time because I refused to indulge myself in my ‘nature.’ In fact, this is specific evidence that you thought I’d need to be  _ mutated _ in order to become something.”

“Change isn’t always a deviation from your path and disease is hardly an external stimulus. Regardless, patients often see positive results in using psychedelics to process great traumas.”

“And so your next statement will imply that the catalyst for my psychosis just happened to be homegrown. I didn’t exactly sign a waver on that treatment.”

“It was not an illness I purposefully injected. Observation is not a crime.”

“Failure to intervene is actually specifically a violation of your sworn oath. My skull is no longer serving as the shell of a microwave, Hannibal. I’ve spent my adult life interpreting the next moves of people who operate under the belief they are the smartest person in every room. Right now you aren’t.”

“With all due respect to your studies and profession, Will Graham: you aren’t so well-versed in a psyche like mine.”

“Puppeteering is not proof of expertise or exceptionalism, Hannibal.” He tilted his head slowly. “I wonder why… you were so unconcerned about the potentially lethal outcomes of this experiment.”

“Call it expertise.” The world cleaved in half for a moment at the implications. “I wonder what drives you so mad in this life you have at the FBI. Is it that you've been made to stomach these horrors and are growing overly familiar with them after all this time? Or is it that you are made to stomach that it  _ is _ all so horribly familiar? The animal in you, watching now with a grin as it recognizes itself in the fun-house mirror.”

A silence rang a tuning fork through the room.

  
  


“There’s something about you, Dr. Lecter. I don’t feel as though these urges are being explored by someone… at all interested in my wellness so much as... I feel your talons on my shoulders, your whisper in my head… trying to cultivate your opposing queen piece on the chessboard.” 

“Oh? Is it a match? You’re so sure I want a mirrored piece for some clever opposition?”

Will tried to assemble any meaning at all from the challenging stare.

“No, I’m not even sure… who you are.”


	3. Tick Tick--

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Now that Will's brain is not ablaze and he's lost his truth-obscuring faith in the doctor, he connects dots for himself.  
> (...quite violent)

A chill came during the night and kissed the hardwood floors. Will felt the clammy lamination under his bare toes as soon as he climbed out of bed. (The dogs had been whining.) He didn’t have to be anywhere until the afternoon, so he allowed himself to luxuriate in his new fever-less lifestyle. _[Still a glutton for migraines, apparently.]_

He preferred to take the dogs out to roam further in the field, but his exhaustion in combination with the ungodly cold had him resign to opening the door a smidge for them.

As the seven dogs spilled out, sniffing the old snow and soggy grass that definitely has not changed since last night, he saw him. There, climbing out swiftly from his luxury car, was Hannibal Lecter - in a coat with a fittingly rough-textured stiffness for the man wearing it.

“Were you waiting for me to wake up?” Will called, huddled in on himself in the cold morning.

“I was.”

They both hesitated for several moments, breath fogging the air, before Will scoffed and flicked his head. “Oh, _Jesus Christ_. Come in.”

  
  
  


Once inside, Hannibal, always one for shameless presumption, hung his outerwear and slipped off his wet shoes, hinting that he was prepared for a long-winded explanation, no doubt laced with a performance of rehearsed half-regret. 

Will allowed a second before speaking, “I’ll start since I wanna give you time to get settled, seeing as you have yet to completely shape your smug expression into one of mournful neutrality.” He sneered. “What do you believe you _saw_ that made me deserve your method of boiling?” His brain unhelpfully supplied: _[pasta? Ha. Wrong audience.]_

“As I said last night: a man encumbered.” Hannibal’s mouth barely moved around the words.

“Did you come here to cycle through the same defenses? You nearly killed me in your plays at my relief.”

Hannibal, unwisely, approached him. “I could hardly help myself. Even _you_ referred to me as hedonistic if you recall. I walked into the chapel of your skull with a candle and found a new religion.” 

Will rolled his head along with his eyes at the unsubtle psychology of towering over your inferiors. This morning was not going to go this way. “You entered my mind with a _miner’s lantern,_ liking what you found.”

“I rather prefer my own metaphor, but I can see why you’d reject it.”

“If it is so 'holy' to you, why would you chip away at my realities? Miner analogy works better.”

“It was a glorious opportunity to bear witness to this chance at radical progress. It was not productive to interrupt that.”

Hannibal took another step forward and Will took a step back.

“Why are you so certain that all things have to be reborn in fire? Are you that unsure of your own abilities as a therapist? Sounds like I was taking care of all my ‘trauma work’ myself.” A chuckle.

“Perhaps. I applaud your inflammation, Will.” Hannibal lifted a hand to stroke the shorter man’s cheek, a patronizing gesture that was jerkily dodged in time. “Humans are just chemical collections, intelligent fibers, convinced we ‘think’ and ‘do’. You and I, like everyone else, are just energy and matter in a pattern. You had the opportunity of unpatterning. I allowed you that. Is that not a therapy?”

  
  
  


After a beat, Will cracked his neck and crossed the room to open the front door as a silent cue. The dogs took this as their call to file back in, dragging snow into the house. Ellie beelined to Hannibal, snowy nose marking his gray slacks.

The man did his best to gracefully step around the masses, but stopped at the door.

“I’ll admit, I anticipated your throwing me from your home, so I wrote you a letter. Please read it before you use it as a coaster.”

Will accepted the envelope without making eye contact. “Goodbye, Dr. Lecter.”

  
  
  


00000

_Will,_

_How lovely it is to pen your name. I sit here in my study, as I do many nights, and I have you in mind, as I do many nights. Since we last spoke, I have realized, in all of my efforts to persuade you to allow yourself liberation, I deprived myself of the chance at my own in failing to make amends. Alcoholics know it as the 9th step._

_I am confident that your ever changing concept of who I am waits at the back of your tongue in the moments we’re together, afraid of whatever may come back to you should you say it aloud. You worry if you are right. I will tell you simply, as you called me your puppeteer: there is not enough wire or thread on earth to take hold of your glory. In all of your untethered pieces and hard-earned rancor, you are a beautiful and unknowable animal. That is to say, I never could have imagined you, much less created all that you already are._

_Will Graham, as your dismissed psychiatrist, I will make an unsolicited suggestion in the interest of your nutrition. The impulses, the ones you train yourself to choke on, you might try feeding on them instead._

_There are human traits that not a single person can kill. Do not bloody yourself in attempts to carve them out._

_Yours,_

_Dr. Hannibal Lecter_

00000

  
  
  


Will successfully resisted the urge to read it again before folding it into a square to sit under his mug on the kitchen table. He over-poured his coffee.

  
  


\----***----

  
  


_/Incoming call: jack/_

“Hey, Jack.”

“Richmond PD have a girl they think escaped from the local ring. She says her friend just died.”

“Is she at the hospital or still at the station?”

“Hospital. Dr. Lecter suggested we take a look at what the PD got from her and then reach out to the case worker before bombarding her. She’s pretty traumatized.”

Will tried to glide past his impulse to make a snide remark about taking Dr. Lecter’s advice. “She have family in the States?”

“No, and she’s mostly speaking Russian but the translators are saying she’s probably not from Russia.”

“I’m glad she’s speaking a language we can work with. And that she’s speaking at all.”

“You’ll be at the academy today? They’ve faxed their notes.”

Will rubbed his eyes. “I’m at the academy right now, Jack. West cafeteria.”

Jack, of course, immediately hung up. The office equivalent of watching puddle vibrations in _Jurassic Park_.

  
  


.

.

.

  
  


“Will.”

  
  


\----***----

  
  


_[4:14PM] There is a dude here. Nice clothes, white, accent. Says he has a key. From the fbi?_

  
  


Will was already so incredibly irritated at the idea of having to pore over Richmond PD’s messy notes and having to stay - no doubt - until the early morning to do it, that he wanted to crush something into dust at the idea of Hannibal breaking in. Or hold the man’s rib cage the way a wrestler grip might crush a soda can. At least he was sure he would not do anything unsavory to a friend of his on the same day he tried to regain his trust. No, he’d wait a few weeks.

**[4:14PM] What is he doing**

_[4:16PM] He is literally swiffering your floors I’m not kidding_

  
  
  
  


_/Dialing:_ _dr. Lecter *t he psych/_

“Hello, Will.”

“Not tidy enough for you?”

“I noticed your dogs tracking in snow and mud this morning. I presumed you would leave shortly after and couldn’t address it.”

_[He’s panting.] …….. [From cleaning your house.]_

“It’s been…” Will checked the clock on his laptop and pressed his fingers into his eyes, “it’s been almost eight hours since then. Did you stay in the area?”

“I had a patient to meet at Sibley Memorial and then I returned.” Hannibal was using an overly chipper voice, a hint that Sam was watching his conversation.

“You went back to _Wolf Trap_ just to clean my house? An issue with your own neuroses or are you disabling my carbon monoxide detectors?”

“I did not realize you had someone who cared for your dogs now.”

“Yeah I do. Don’t talk to her.”

Hannibal huffed impatiently. “We startled each other, so I made nice. Are you still at the office?”

“Yes, looking through Vira’s statement and panels.”

“I will be there soon.”

  
  
  


At the blinking screen from another abruptly ended call, Will wished he was holding a wood pencil he could snap. Or that he could afford to throw his phone against the wall. The mystery of who Hannibal was had taken over Will so profoundly, he’d been feeling it like a rot since his diagnosis and yet, under all of his potential monster, the psychiatrist was still a clingy old man. If anything, it supported Hannibal’s claim that he’d taken a special interest in Will; he would be impossibly busy if he was this devoted to all of his patients.

  
  
  


_[4:31PM] He left. Figured you’d want confirmation_

_[4:31PM] Floors are spotless_

  
  
  
  


Places Will had known for these last few years were going putrid. Maybe hospitals do that, make you conscious of how foreign you are in your own world, how removable you are from it. Maybe Hannibals do that. Expedite decay or make you aware of it. Will’s familiar refrain grew the most confident it had been in his adult life: _[you don’t belong here. You don’t belong here.]_

He made an effort to focus his blurry eyes on the report again.

  
  
  


Before the sun even set, an utterly uninvited Hannibal was joining him at his desk at Quantico.

Will didn’t look up. “They killed her friend in front of her. She took a city bus to 4th precinct after walking for an hour. Doesn’t know which bus or which way she came from. All she knows is she was held in a suburb by a river for about 18 months.”

Hannibal didn’t miss a beat: “Hardly narrows anything down for Virginia.”

“The radius of confirmed associated killings goes as south as Charlotte, as west as lower Ohio, and all the way to VB.”

“And those are just confirmed. So there are more. A potentially larger radius?”

“Yeah. Those are strictly body dumps of women and teens said to be from the same ring, but there may be evidence of actual traffickers that extends this further.”

Hannibal placed a picture back down into the pile, handling it like a photo in a university archive. “Wouldn’t be in Philadelphia or New York considering the competition.”

“That’s what I’m thinking.”

Hannibal leaned in to speak, despite having this entire wing to themselves. “What will you do?”

Will looked up at that. “What do you mean? What will _I do?_ What will _you_ do? You looked at Vira’s case, too. Or does that not get to you?”

Hannibal straightened his back again. “It is _deeply_ vile, but I can hardly hope to bring down a ring, much less provide any help to released women.”

“The Virginia leg of their op is small.” He trailed off.

A moment passed. 

“Will, what are you thinking?”

  
  


A moment passed. 

“Do you speak any Russian?”

Hannibal stood up.

  
  


\----***----

  
  


The men opted to take Will’s car. _[Might as well carpool if you’ve already decided to open your life to the beast.]_

Halfway to Richmond, Will interrupted their thought-chasing silence. “I think… you always see yourself presented with a choice. Be charged or send the new ones charging.”

“I don’t need patients to do my bidding. I have agency in my life and… I know how consequences can be avoided.”

Will nodded slowly. _[confirmation he’s what you think he is.]_ “What are you going to do to me, doctor?”

“It depends.”

“... on?” _[Jesus, it’s like pulling teeth.]_

“What kind of animal you are.”

A sinister chuckle. “Not your echo, if that’s what your narcissism is itching for.”

“Certainly not my echo. A translation, maybe. You and I translate one another across whatever axes we create.” Hannibal spoke frankly, as though he’d had this thought for weeks. He probably did.

“All meaning is a translation of something. You don’t know me well enough to say that’s the case for us.” Will could feel the eyes drilling into his profile while he drove.

“Maybe it’s not possible to know you without your permission. Can I ever hope for your permission, Will?”

He laughed and hit the wheel. “Doubt it.”

  
  
  
  
  


The pair confirmed their affiliation with the FBI at the VA hospital’s front desk, maybe obscuring a bit how annexed they were from the case.

  
  
  
  
  


Vira wasn’t very hurt, but certainly traumatized and a little malnourished, so she was being kept in the main hospital rather than critical care. God, she was a frail one. 24 years old but looked a decade younger in the patient bed.

“Hi. Vira?”

She was awake, but Will’s voice seemed to pull her into the present. “Hello?”

Hannibal took over, sliding up a chair for himself beside her bed. “We were viewing your case and had a few questions about the identity of some of the men who held you.”

Will surprised Hannibal with his gentle tone, “whatever you can add about the area would help us if you can’t remember the men.”

She quickly began, “the house it was purple with three steps before the door. Some trees are around but the house is near a park.”

Will wrote this down in a less overt way, attempting to keep this conversation as personable as possible.

Vira continued, mostly looking at Hannibal. “Before the house there is…” she waved a hand back and forth, palm down.

The men made eye contact.

“A gate?” Will tried, knowing that was probably not a word she knew.

Hannibal, whose Russian was only slightly more conversational than Vira’s English, tried, “vorota? Kryl’tso?”

“Kryl’tso.” Vira looked skeptical of his accent. “Belaya drevesina.”

“She says it was a white wooden porch.” Hannibal turned to Will and followed up, “I think she is from the Ukraine.” He turned to her again. “Gde vy rodilis?”

“Ya ne znayu.”

Hannibal translated, “she doesn’t know where she is from. In other words, she won’t say.”

Vira looked at Will, probably imagining that Hannibal was a social worker and Will was a cop, “the men are short. The girls are speaking different language.”

“How many girls?”

“Maybe it’s 15. But different girls at different time. The men were just three but always are the same.”

“The house. Big or small?”

“Small. Every girls are in just one room.”

“And near a river… is the river water light or dark?”

“Very dark.”

“One minute, Vira.”

  
  
  


Will and Hannibal stepped into the hallway and the profiler whispered quickly, knowing his audience could follow along. “So, she walked for an hour and got to a city bus station. Malnourished like that gives her at most two and a half miles per hour and, unless she knew exactly where 4th Precinct was, she was just getting off at the densest part of the city. Wouldn’t have wanted to stay still very long, so she probably got on the first bus that headed into town. I was looking at the lines that run Friday morning with higher frequency. The initial report said that all she knows is that she rode a single car bus for less than half an hour but more than 10 minutes. Not the color - not the line. She knew she was by a river not a lake or a bay, so that means she saw the water moving and saw the other side.”

“James River is not that polluted or muddy, so possibly one of the creeks.”

“Right, so pull up a map.” Will waited about two seconds after the app opened before taking Hannibal’s phone from his hands. “See, over this way is a new developed area. They wouldn’t be constructing purple houses with wooden porches. That’s old Virginian. But over _here_ is Tuckahoe Creek and the ‘park’ she was talking about could either be this cemetery or this golf course. 35 minute bus ride to downtown, buses every 15 minutes on weekdays.”

“How certain are you?” Hannibal barely contained awe.

“... not entirely,” Will responded with a joking sheepishness. Certain.

“Let’s go.”

  
  
  
  


“Hi, Vira, thank you for your help. We are going to take this information with us.”

“You are not police.” She stared squarely at them.

That stopped them in their tracks. Hannibal and Will made confused eye contact but couldn’t drum up a response.

“You are not police. The way he talks.” She pointed at Hannibal.

Will stared. _[not the fact that he is multilingual or that he appears wealthy. She looks more than skeptical. Panicked? almost… meaning… the men are Eastern European but don’t speak Russian well.]_

“Who are you?” She was exclusively talking to Hannibal now. “He knows who you are?” Vira’s face swiveled to Will. “You know who he is?”

Hannibal was tensing but didn’t know at all what she was implying. “I’m a doctor.”

“You will kill them. Are you a friend with Jaana? You will kill the men.”

Something about the way that Will and Hannibal instinctively didn’t make eye contact with each other to avoid looking conspiratorial (despite truly not having a clue about who she believed they were) still led to the next thing she said.

“Take me with you.”

The younger man was gathering pieces for a growing picture. “Vira… who is Jaana?”

“A woman she come to the house to talk with the men.”

“In what language?”

“I don’t know.”

“What did it sound like?” Will tried to pull back a bit to make it clear that his voice was urgent because the information was important, not because he was impatient with her. So as to not agitate someone traumatized.

“I don’t know. Not Russian, not Czech. Not German, not Polskiy.” She waved her hand in a way so casual it made it clear that her earlier affect was theater.

Will looked at Hannibal, who understood the prompt. “‘koks tavo vardas?’ ‘ar ji kalbėjo lietuviškai?’ Did it sound like that?”

She nodded quickly. “It sound like that.”

He flicked his eyes to Will. “So, to untrained ears, it could be any Baltic language, perhaps others.”

Will gave it another shot. “Is Jaana their friend? Why does she want to kill them?”

“Everyone wants to kill them.”

Hannibal observed her for a moment. “Why do you want to come with us?”

“Everyone wants to kill them.”

  
  
  
  
  


\----***----

With their gathered information, it took less than an hour to find the house. The night made it harder to decipher house colors, but Vira helped them once they got close. She wasn’t hooked up to an IV or any monitors, so she slipped out of the hospital with them as though they were going to the movies.

  
  
  


They idled in front of the house for a few moments which, as they predicted, was a siren call for paranoid criminals. Two men stepped onto the porch. Houses in the neighborhood, if you can call it that, were each separated by their own thicket of woods. Definitely old Virginia.

Vira hunkered down a bit in the back seat and, when no one in the car stepped out, the strange men approached.

At the sound of their muffled exchange on the way down the lawn, Hannibal turned to Will and whispered, “Latvian. They think we’re here to ‘pick up’. I presume that means for women.”

Vira grew so silent under Hannibal’s coat that it was almost possible to forget she was there. A necessary skill for her.

The man closer to the car, with his best attempt at stoicism, began right away. “You are?”

Hannibal rolled the window down slightly. “We’re here for a girl named Vira.”

A gun was drawn so fast at the name that Will’s cop instincts almost sent him barrelling out of the driver’s seat. The man a few steps closer to the house adjusted his pants. _[No gun.]_

“Why do you know her name?”

Will chimed in, “Jaana sent us to check in.”

“Who the fuck are you?” The man was waving his glock along with his words as he stepped up to the car.

Hannibal whipped the passenger door out to hit him, which made a cold metallic sound, pushing his gun-yielding arm down against his side. He didn’t lose his grip on the weapon, but the confusion slowed him for a moment, allowing Hannibal to kick his knees out. By the time the man lifted his glock from his place on the ground, Will had moved up behind him and kicked his arm, pinning it with his boot to the ground above his head. The man’s legs were bent awkwardly below him and any move to get out of his position would require him to twist his wrist further than it should go.

While Will had him pinned, the other, stockier, stranger finally moved into action, hustling to tackle Hannibal like a linebacker.

He was successful. Hannibal laid winded on the grass by the car, rolling over to heave. The linebacker moved in on Will to release his friend on the ground. There was no choice but to sidestep, but Will took a second to grind his foot into the wrist before moving. 

The man writhed in pain. If a bone didn’t break, at least a tendon severed. When he rolled over to grab the gun with his left hand, Hannibal made his way to the man and straddled his back, pushing his face into half dry soil. His sputtering caused him to inhale whatever loose dust sat by his mouth. When Hannibal got to his feet, he jumped on the man’s head like a child jumps on a bed. He allowed himself a second of satisfaction at the man’s stillness on the lawn before looking over at Will, wrestling with the brute in the darkness. It took only a small part of a moment before they made eye contact and Hannibal tossed the gun to Will, who, instead of cocking it and pressing it to the man’s temple as a warning, accepted the weapon and shot it into the man’s gut.

Surprise.

Will sat under the faucet of blood before pushing the man off. 

They checked. Neither man was completely dead, but their wounds would take care of it soon. The gunshot was muzzled by the meat of the stomach, but still there was enough of a scuffle out front that some movement started up inside of the house. 

They ran into the kitchen, where a man was wielding a knife. It was all so familiar. Only now, the girls were locked in a bedroom rather than stitched into pillows. But would Will choke this time?

A single shot in the neck. This time, the sound went unmuzzled. All these months later, the knife clattered to the floor and no blue eyed daughter choked along with him.

  
  


Will took a breath to say goodbye to himself in some small hymn. Whatever he was before meeting Dr. Hannibal Lecter has long been singing from under the earth. Maybe he has been new for some time now, but unrecognizable (hasn’t rusted in yet). 

  
  
  


They walked back to the car. 

Will’s voice was harsh and determined.

“Vira. Explain to them, no one knows where the house is. No one knows where the men are. They wait until morning before going to the women’s shelter – that means a house for women to go for free – in Richmond. All that happened tonight was this: You, me, and the doctor went on a walk around the hospital.”

Vira nodded frantically. “I promise you. We went on a walk.”

She practically ran inside to talk to the girls while Hannibal and Will lugged the three men onto a tarp that Will usually lays down for fishing excursions. It smelled that way.

  
  
  
  
  


The national forest wasn’t far from there and they’d have no onlookers considering it wouldn’t open up again until spring. But even all of their combined knowledge of evading the authorities wouldn’t be enough to erase the events of the evening. Not for long. People talk. Even if they’re afraid.

The snow was still frozen in this part of the hills and they pulled up as far as they could get without creating tracks in wet dirt.

  
  
  


“Here. Stack them like rubble.” _[Not quite a night deserving of ceremony.]_

They both got out of the car. 

Hannibal was alight. “I could never imagine the creature you are.”

They held a gaze before Will began the unloading process. “You can map the vascular system better than I can. Cut them. Mark them up like they were killed by lightning.”

“A smiting?” Hannibal’s eyes were filled with something so warm it was beyond incongruent to the atmosphere.

“It wasn’t intended to mimic divine punishment, Hannibal.” _[Unconscious motives I will explore another time or never. We are all a little woven with threads of old desert tales.]_

“Everything is inherently religious to some. It was divine to _me_.”

He tossed a fleeting grip on Will’s hair.

“So, after we’re done here, we take Vira back to the hospital.” 

Hannibal sighed. “By not killing her, you’re putting us at tremendous risk. In fact, I’d say inevitable danger. People can not help but confess their traumas and their sins.”

Will avoided his eyes. “I know.”

“I’m concerned. What it says about you that, when faced with weighing your life against another’s, you decide the scales always tip in their favor.” 

The younger man wouldn’t be convinced. _[What was all this for if not for saving? No, this is not a sport for me.]_ “She lives.”

Hannibal continued his slicing, mimicking the capillary path of a lightning strike. “Then we’ll leave.”

Will dropped the final man into the pile and unbuttoned the bloody shirt. “What?”

“Will, your sentimental recklessness will not imprison me. That leaves me with very few options, a majority of which you will not like.” 

_[whiplash. whiplash. whiplash. whiplash. whiplash. whiplash. whiplash. whiplash. whiplash. whiplash.]_

“Fine.” He didn’t look up, trying to divorce himself from the weight of a promise like that. “These won’t be found until the snow melts. They’ll be preserved like freezer-burned steaks.”

Hannibal stood, pocketing the fingerprint-painted knife. “You need to tell me if you believe your mind could change. It will decide the direction of this evening.”

Will, recalling a conversation of revelations and promises in the man's office, said it this time with a bit more conviction, “okay. We’ll leave.” Because it was true. He meant it.

  
  


In the morning, Vira would be interviewed in her same old VA hospital patient room and Will would file for paid leave, with plans to spin that into a resignation. If the academy or the BAU were surprised by his claiming an illness, then they were worryingly terrible at their jobs. It’s hardly even a lie.

After dropping her off at the hospital, they got in Will’s now dewy car and drove straight through Virginia to Hannibal’s Maryland home. _[He can get his fucking Bentley tomorrow.]_

The uninterrupted fill of adrenaline and dopamine at the idea of who he was letting himself become was… too much. What had crept into him since Hobbs was now in his body like tinnitus and extra muscles. 

\----***----

“Luckily, it seems neither of us have broken anything.”

“Just bruises that I will have trouble explaining at work.”

  
  


Will helped Hannibal roll gauze diagonally around his torso. “So, you… all these years. All those people.”

“And you, Will… _this_ year. All those people.” Hannibal was not afraid to bite him even if his wounds were in Will’s care. “Have you decided on whether you're fated to damnation? Am I?”

A pause for a shared smile.

“Jury’s out. Not sure God, if one exists, entertains insanity pleas.”

The older man pursed his lips with a half intended humor, “perhaps you’ll postpone the trial metaphors until we’re safely on the road.” 

“Arguably, by bringing up damnation, you started the trial metaphors.” Will raised his eyebrows in a challenging punctuation. He patted the secured gauze.

Hannibal only responded with a glinting eye before turning the shorter man around to take a better look at his rock-marked back. And if he dragged his fingers along his skin beyond necessity, no one would say a word.

  
  


Will spoke through a foggy silence. “I wonder why there’s nothing vulgar about you. Everything in you is swept and sorted. But, if someone knew how to look at you, Hannibal, there is something there. A ruby light on a broken window. It’s beautiful, still. But haunting in a way it keeps me up at night.” _[I’ll always be losing reality to you, won’t I?]_

Hannibal kept his focus on lathering a gash near Will’s scapula. “And yet you never flinch from me. Why?”

“I’m not afraid of you. There’s nothing like some cloven hoof, or forked tongue. Charming a person is a small type of delirium, isn’t it? And you delight in your… your parties.” Will stuttered, nearly forming a thought but unsure of what it was. “You flirt and entertain, all while harboring quite the secret. It’s like a practical joke on the Baltimore elite…”

  
  


A flipping earth. A fast spinning room. Hannibal’s hands retreated in the orbit. The ringing briefly returned.

  
  
  


_[It’s people.]_ “You eat – you feed them to us.”

After a moment of something other than deliberation, Hannibal managed, “yes.”

“That’s…” Will began to quake with a gagging grimace, suddenly unable to swallow his spit.

“Wouldn’t you say you feasted tonight? Almost gluttonous in our consumption.” The man lifted a hand to touch him but decided against it, lest he push him away more than he already had. “You’ve pulled muscles trying to avoid what you knew.”

The younger man still said nothing.

  
  


“Will, I don’t mean to appear…” he genuinely hesitated, “but will we still leave together?”

  
  
  


Will’s eyes closed. _[You folded up yourself to not know what you know. Too late now to blind this down into a thought unrecalled. That was a life ago.] “Maybe there is a beast… maybe it’s only us,_ ” he quoted, mostly to himself. 

“You are not a beast.” Hannibal ran his hands roughly through Will’s hair. “And man never agrees on laws. You can construct imagined worlds because you aren't building with foreign materials.”

  
  


_[Graham, he said you're made of the same stuff. You and him.]_

  
  
.

.

Minutes. Minutes of very-not-medical hands poking at - but doing nothing for - Will’s bruised back.

  
  


Will started. “So…”

“Within the month, I’d say.”

Will tried to take an inventory of what he’d miss. _[fuck, that’s a short list.]_ “I can’t sell my house that fast, Hannibal.”

“I was imagining we could share an agent. I already work with a man who I would trust to handle the process remotely once we get appraisals. Oversee a few technician walkthroughs.”

“This is insane.”

Hannibal’s brow flicked up. “I’m outstandingly curious why you’d say that only after I’ve said the first logistically reasonable thing all evening.”

“Well, because the development of a practical plan makes this real.” Will laughed through a grimace. 

“So that’s a ‘yes’ on sharing an agent? It would probably encourage him to work more diligently for you if he’s associating your property with the penny he makes off of mine.” 

“Cars?” The trembling came back a little. _[It's real. It's all so real.]_

“Sell both and buy new.”

“Dogs?”

Hannibal looked down, almost guiltily. “That’s your choice. What would you like to do with them?”

 _[Seven confused fugitives to be brought along? Well, no.]_ “I think,” he sighed, “finding new homes. My dog sitter can help with that. I’m keeping Winston, though.”

  
  


_[Dear God. I have been led into temptation. Amen.]_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> all so fast? stay tuned


	4. The Temperature of Cement When You Wake on It

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> very brief allusion to past child abuse

*

*

\---------Weeks ago---------

“Unfortunately, our work together will necessitate more than exploring your cases. I’d like to learn more about you. And explore the nature of your hallucinations.”

“So, do we have to begin tonight? Or can I marinate for a week in self pity and fever dreams first?”

“We can cut the evening short. But I want to return to your story with your uncle. I’m sure you are aware that I pick up on half-truths.”

Will stilled. The squeaky clean MRI was enough confirmation for his lifelong forecast for a brutal mental decline. He didn’t need to go hunting in any old story to try to divide out where things went wrong. When things were over, he liked to be done with them. _[Break every mirror - luck be damned - just to keep from seeing backwards._ _Ruin places. You let places ruin themselves. Necessary skill.]_

“What were the lying halves?” _[Give it a shot.]_

Dr. Lecter sat back in his chair. “I think you have regrets.”

Will made an attempt at volume control before responding, “what regrets could I possibly have? I was a little kid, threatened by a man wielding thousands of years of promises for a very fiery afterlife. Didn’t have much agency in that situation.”

“But the thoughts still weigh on you so many years later.”

An eye roll to deny and a chair grip to confirm. “This is not a big sigh of relief to talk about. Bringing up my uncle won’t offer any doors into my psyche, I promise you.”

“Knowing well that you’ve painted them all shut, yes, I’m sure. What did he see, Will?”

“I was a bad kid.” Will tried and failed to sound unaffected. Attempts at a sardonic tone were falling more on the side of self-defense.

The doctor, sensing this, prodded for more, “I hardly think you were lighting the neighbor’s cat on fire.”

“When I look at my time near him, first practically sharing a roof in Biloxi, then visiting him every few years down where he ended up. A little town right on the other side of the Mississippi border in old Louisiana.” He paused to roll his head around, and wipe his hands on his pant legs. “It seemed like he was trying to convince my dad to drop me like my mother did. Saw something rotten, I guess.”

“Nothing about you has ever been rotten, Will.”

“I’m not so sure. Like you said the other night, it was getting a little too friendly with the wrong kind and not the right kind of friendly with the good ones. _Apparently_.”

The room just about rattled with all the word’s deafening implications: he hurt me. Undertone: bad.

“‘Wrong kind’ being boys your age?” Obviously not the true depth of the lesson, but the question is another crowbar.

“Something like that.”

Will and Dr. Lecter held challenging eye contact.

“And what of your uncle?” He leaned forward in his chair, nearly murmuring.

“I looked him up years ago in the database. A few DUI's. So he’s still alive, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  
  


“There were many moments with him. You told me of one instance.” Dr. Lecter’s eyebrow twitched up in a small scolding. “What interrupted your childhood self-concept so much as to make a slice into your remembrances? What did you glean then, that made such a profound impression that it takes you out of your earthly right to a time-linear story?”

  
  


He submitted. “The day I learned to hide myself.”

“The first of many instances you were taught that lesson, I’m sure.” An unchanged affect. 

Will laughed. “It became something of a virtue, yes.”

“You made yourself presentable in all the ways available to you.”

"Spit polished silver is polished silver, after all.” An eyebrow raise and eye roll at the memories. And the entire conversation. Will, in fact, did not surprise himself with how profoundly uncomfortable he was becoming. Though the sweat could be the fevers, he supposed.

“That it is.” The doctor ebbed with the intensity in the conversation. 

There was a rolling pause, both half-smiles fading with it.

“I started picking up along the way how to wear any person. I’d gained daddy’s habit of hopping boatyards in a sense. Began to change too quickly to fit in the same old coats.”

“Rapid growth or costume change?”

“Biloxi, Erie, Augusta, New Orleans, Wolf Trap, Quantico.” Will adjusted his neck and looked around the same old office. “Not sure where backstage is.”

“And Baltimore? On which side of this curtain am I, Will?” He looked more interested in the answer than he probably ought to be, considering he knew it already.

“I’m not even sure that I’ve been back there myself since I learned all these tricks.”

“No plans to find out? No plans for retribution?”

“Are you going to tell me how to _know_ myself, Dr. Lecter?” What was supposed to be a patronizing jab at psychiatrists ended up closer to something near self-deprecation.

The doctor clasped his hands together in his lap, looking amused. “Nothing so convenient, I’m afraid. I’m not one for memory exploration purely as a form of expressive relief. It might be more productive for us to draw you out rather than go digging for something indistinct, as it were.”

Both men quirked their heads a little in a silent moment. 

Dr. Lecter ( who was pushing it if he actually wanted to carry out the promise to cut the appointment short) added, “imagine yourself back in those moments. Learning burial. What will you do this time? To create a life uninterrupted by warped glimpses of the past. What will you do?”

  
  
  
  
  
  


.

  
  
  


**[8:14PM] My treat?**

[8:16PM] ok Graham 

[8:16PM] but recognize how different our dynamic would be if you were ugly

\----------------Now-----------------

*

*

.

.

  
  


He was, no surprise, replaceable as a professor. Jack, however, would probably decide to simply ignore his resignation now that it officially came in.

  
  


Over the weeks following their decision, Hannibal came to the house every few days to lay out logistics and to help Will settle his affairs (money transfers, web of lies, etc.). Sam came over a few times to help with rehoming the dogs, but her thesis was gaining pages and the snow was melting and it was all so different now. Will was both sad and proud at how quickly these young families were responding to his ads. Anticipating the likelihood of the three of them sharing a space, Will never explained to Sam that he discovered the man had actually withheld his diagnosis. That would make for unnecessary additions to the already lengthy list he’d been using to provide context for the swiffer man’s sudden constant presence.

It was, naturally, _obvious_ what Sam was assuming but it was easier to allow for the mud of assumptions and omissions that his life was becoming. The man in question was dusting high surfaces and falling asleep in armchairs these days, fine fabrics folding against Will’s worn upholstery. Much to Sam’s delight, swiffering made a reappearance as well.

Here he was, unintentionally domesticating a wild animal in his space all while becoming rabid himself. Will was accustomed to his utilitarian life for too long; murky and profane. His drawers full of multi-pack clothing were evidence enough. He tried to grasp at whatever straw of confidence that might help him claim complexity over stillness, over itchy stagnation. Hannibal promised that, wherever they wound up, Will could still have his “Thoreau mornings”. They needed to leave together because of a conscious negligence on Will’s part, a decision he’d look back on and wonder why he didn’t just cover his tracks or, better yet, _not kill multiple men_ . He’d have been able to keep his life. No reason to leave it all behind. No excuse to leave it all behind. Will found himself checking and rechecking the construction on that painted partition he’d once diligently made to say _[don’t want this. You don’t. You don’t.]_

Abigail came over once. She graciously accepted the strange inheritance of a plaid-lined cargo jacket from Will and his promise to reach out to her in the future. Will almost wished she could’ve met Sam but, he supposed, he didn’t need to see the parts of his life fit together when they wouldn’t be parts of his life anymore. His realities were shifting now and very few things would shift along with them. Maybe Abigail would go to Tulane, walk down a street he saw when he was her age. That’d be some kind of a crossed path. Considering her entry into his life was something of a crucible, it’d be nice if the next overlap involved sweet tea and magnolias.

  
  


Alana called a few times to check in, slowly gathering that his vague (but apparently emergency) departure from the FBI would lead to a departure from her as well, albeit more subtle and laced with politeness. It stung a little on both ends and that wasn’t even _really_ the reason for his recession but it was all part of the same deal anyway. More mud of assumption and omission. 

  
  


One day, nearing their leave, Hannibal wistfully indicated the increasingly stark house with a soft hand and a softer sigh. “This is how I prefer my kingdom.” 

All of the Bruce Springsteen CD’s and river-affiliated decor were long gone, not to mention he’d wiped every surface of the place at that point. “Yeah, I bet. Sparkling.” Will mockingly dragged a finger along the top of the dresser.  
Hannibal looked at him with an impatient glare. “Point being: just you and I within its borders.”

  
  


And yeah, there was that. With too much practice, Will had finally discovered a comfortable way to accept compliments and general kindnesses: just say nothing.

  
  
  


\----***----

  
  


“Okay, no mischief allowed,” Hannibal softly warned Winston with a scrub behind his ears. Winston was a well-tempered dog but, with the added attention, giant rental SUV, and the mystery destination, he was bounding around the driveway in energetic circles. Hannibal gazed up at Will with an exhausted _‘look at your son’s behavior’_ expression before rolling up beach towels for the back seat.

_[Well, at least it will tire him out.]_

They let the dog show off for them a little longer before luring him into the car and getting going.

Will stared into the back seat, reaching with a finger to pet the top of Winston’s paw. “We’ll get a friend for Winston once we’re settled.” 

Hannibal smiled and wasted no time. “Agreed.”

Will, who had made the statement expecting strong opposition that he would whittle down over time through a mixture of passive aggression and emotional manipulations, found the immediate submission beyond suspicious. “That was quick.”

Hannibal looked up from his own neurotic seat adjusting. “Everyone who has been to your home is aware that welcoming in your little companions is a toll on the road to being your friend. As I expect I’ll run out of excuses for not joining you on your fishing trips, I thought this would pacify you.”

The other man’s expression rotated through a few emotions. “There are too many things I could say to this thread of conversation that I’m just going to circle back to the point.” Will looked at Winston, knowing he was projecting his own complex human emotions onto this panting, beaming face. “If I fall asleep and he gets agitated back there, wake me up. He eats in the morning and night. I brought dry food for the road – that’s in the green duffel – but once we are situated, I’ll start cooking for him again.”

Hannibal, who had discreetly checked that Will remembered to pack his clothes and prescriptions while the man himself triple-checked he had everything for his dog, made sure to appear incredibly engaged.

They buckled their seat belts with hearty sighs and pulled out onto the back road. Will made a conscious effort to not look through the window or rear view mirror until they were on the highway in case his brain fast-tracked a warning of what will become future aching nostalgia. He peered at Hannibal for a second. _[Fuck.]_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is very short because the alternative was an absolute behemoth and this worked better lol next one is up this week too  
> note: the characters they're leaving behind will still be in the story  
> also check out my art on tumblr if you like: @jaydeclan


	5. Blue Ridge Mountains

Only about two hours south, Will’s phone lit up from where it was charging in the console next to their jerky and Japanese peanuts. _[“gas station gourmet.”]_

  
  


_[6:13PM] Can’t believe you are gone =(_

_[6:14PM] And that I took your fugly dresser that barely fits in my place_

**[6:16PM] Winston asks about you. How’s Buster?**

_[6:16PM] He’s very confused_

_[6:17PM] So am I to be honest_

**[6:19PM] Me too**

  
  


Hannibal flicked his eyes to Will for a second. “How is our Samina coping?”

Will looked half in his direction. “She’ll be fine. Ultimately, we hardly knew each other.”

“I don’t see how that’s relevant.” It was clear that he wanted to look at Will again, but Appalachian roads were so winding that even a sneeze could veer someone into danger. 

Beautiful, though. Makes sense that so many people write songs about this place..

  
  


_[6:21PM] If this is cuz I said you had chicken legs I am sorry_

He wished he could make people smile the way Sam effortlessly could.

**[6:21PM] Actually I am going on a reunion tour with the boys**

_[6:23PM] Surely all your original fans are dead by now tho?_

“Oh fuck you.” He laughed into the air.

Hannibal smiled because Will smiled. He did that a lot.

**[6:23PM] Good night, past my bedtime**

_[6:24PM] gn :(_

  
  
  
  


\----***----

By the time they reached the Smokies, the sun was long set and all that peeked through the pines was a starry and god dark sky.

Much of the South is mountains and forests, swampland and rolling hills, and a few parts so flat that the horizon, much like the ocean, really sits where the earth turns. But here, with the windows down, was the feeling of soil leaking its heat from the day and the tingly smell of old trees.

Winston, who had been sitting in an oddly human-like contemplation with his eyes closed, started his whistle-whine out of impatience. When the older man took the cue, he pulled over into a small vista point area for all of them to stretch their legs.

In this spot, if they held their breath, there would be no sound at all.

Will tried to get a little exercise in for him and the dog, playfully chasing Winston over to the grassy part of the overlook. _[Where the world ends.]_ His life had quickly become so chaotic and disorganized in all of his unplanned plans, but he had enough of order. There’s a reason stagnant water is home to bacteria while ocean waves turn stones to sand. It was fully and bodily terrifying. Far away from what he was and soon he’d be far away from here, too. A thought he caught in his teeth whenever he opened his mouth to speak: _[why is this happening and why do I want it so bad?]_

Right when his ankles began to get a little feather light near the ledge - the way they do on bridges - he walked them back to where the car was parked.

  
  


“Alana, hello,” Hannibal answered his phone warmly from a small distance away. “Actually, I’m afraid I’m out through the weekend, but I would love to take a rain-check.” –––––––– “Actually, a friend of mine asked for my company in Seattle. We’re headed to Olympia tomorrow.” ––––––– “It will be nice to see the pine trees.” –––––––– “Well, that sounds nice as well.” ––––––––– “No, the last I’d heard from him was that an emergency required him to pass the torch to his TA to finish off the semester.” ––––––––– “I’m sure he will be.” –––––––––– “You too, goodnight.”

  
  


Will clicked his tongue, looking self-patronizing. “She worried about me?”

Hannibal turned around to look at him, already wearing a smirk. “Dearly.”

“You’re not.” Will approached.

“No.”

They held a gaze. Probably their breath, too, because the only sound was a collection of dog paws shuffling through the parking lot pebbles.

Hannibal raised his arms a little childishly above his head in a stretch. “So, would you like to strain our spines resting for a few hours in the front seats or bruise our tailbones folding the back seats down?”

Will turned toward the car again. “I think it will be too much of a hassle to move our things around. I vote spines.”

“Spines it is.”

  
  
  
  


Will did his best to trick his body into believing this was a bed. “So, does Alana usually call you this late?”

Hannibal saved his analysis of the reason behind the question and tried a different response. “There’s not really a ‘usually’ anymore, is there?”

A beat.

“Would you read something?” Will asked, as though that was a normal request for the two of them. “I know we both have to get some sleep, but I’m still a little…” _[raw from all of the skin shedding; reeling from my flag burning; chewed up by all of our quiet departures.]_ “too awake.”

Hannibal raised his eyebrows at the request and swallowed words but retrieved a pair of glasses from the glove compartment. “You’ve managed to fit both a library and a pharmacy in our luggage, so, _sure_.” A mocking smile. He had even stored some of Will’s favorites in his cliff-side home rather than sell them like he promised he would. “Any other institutions and amenities back there?” 

Will, who had already taken off his shoes and didn’t want to get out of the car, surprised the two other parties in the car by slithering his torso back toward the luggage. His labored breathing was the first signal that he was not quite a gymnast. “Would’ve liked a coffee shop. Any literary preferences?”

Hannibal was entertained. “Whatever you’d like to hear.”

With no grace, Will pulled forward and handed him his well loved copy of _In Cold Blood_ with a prompting look.

The doctor looked genuinely surprised. “This is what you choose to lull you to sleep? Capote? No wonder you have nightmares.”

Will yanked it back. “Believe it or not, my nightmares are not so much about cynicism and farmland.”

“True, I suppose those are daytime passions of yours,” Hannibal murmured, looking pleased with himself.

“C _hrist,_ okay. I’ll choose something else.” Will was hyper-extending and definitely stressing Winston out. “I think I left my copy of _Oh, the Places You’ll Go_ back at the house.”

Hannibal was not used to this version of the man. Aggravated by small prods, yes, but returned teases that remind a person he’s not just a self-buried man. “Unfortunate. I rarely fall asleep without Dr. Seuss.”

His voice came muffled. “It looks like I don’t have much that my therapist would approve of for night time reading.”

“You’re listening to his opinion, disgraced as he is?” Hannibal was putting together that this might be some type of sour flirtation. And perhaps that might be the best he’d get from Will.

Will was stretched completely over his seat and speaking mostly in grunts now, so eventually Hannibal pressed at his back to hint that he should put the effort to rest for both of their sake. He looked back at the touch, half embarrassed at his contortions that shifted him so well into the other man’s personal space.

“I presume it’s out of the question to read from the phone…” Hannibal knew the answer and removed his reading glasses.

Will exhaled and scooted down, already shutting his eyes. “Yes, it’s–”

“The sound of the pages.”

  
  


They ended up in a conversation about sequoia trees (and other conifers older than Buddha) that carried them all the way to sleep. 

\----***----

The sky was still relatively dark when Will stirred awake. They’d gotten just three hours in. The other man had been squinting at him through the small hazy light that spilled down their surroundings. 

Hannibal answered the unasked question. “I like to watch you covered in sleep.”

Will tried to bite away his smile while his eyes lazily slid closed again. “Not such a cozy thought considering who’s watching me.” 

Hannibal looked at him conversationally as though his eyes were still open. “And who am I?”

“Hmm.”

Hannibal reached over the center console just to touch him. Anywhere. “And who are you?”

Will opened the car door so fast you’d think he’d left the stove on. “I’m gonna get Winston set one last time before the morning and then we can head out. You drive. I’m tired.” He shut the door behind him.

Hannibal whispered to himself, “yes, that is exactly who you are.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


The sun took its time creeping up over the hills, but once the light took the sky, Will grabbed his weapon-weight Proust that he couldn’t find the night before. Not quite lullaby reading, but would’ve been nice to fall asleep to. 

Hannibal, seeming to be in his element as the routine driver, sneaked a glance at Will. “Don’t you get carsick?”

“Only if we were on a winding road, but on the highway I can read just fine.” He smiled, all of a sudden getting a distinct and sudden memory of a college road trip he’d definitely never gone on.

Hannibal seemed to sense that. Or had his own memory that wasn’t a memory. “Could you read aloud? Just from wherever you are in the book.”

“Yeah, sure, uh…” he curled the paperback’s left-hand pages around and continued, _“feeling no doubt that there was nothing left for it now but to answer, he said to us: ‘I have friends wherever there are clusters of trees, stricken but not defeated, which have come together with touching perseverance to offer a common supplication to an inclement sky which has no mercy...”_

… 

Will continued on for 20 pages or so before he began to fade. 

  
  


It wasn’t clear that he was still nearly awake when he spoke again some time later. It even made Hannibal jump a little. “I am concerned by my changing mind.”

Brow furrowed. “How so?” 

Will looked out the window. “You seem like someone who doesn’t have to consider themself as precarious. No ledges in you.”

Hannibal said nothing. It wasn’t clear if he was in agreement or introspection.

Will continued with added impatience, “I am all ledges. I don’t have much gratitude for others’ feelings of entitlement over whether or not I fall.”

The doctor coiled against that. “It was my convincing that made you realize that you’re entitled to want to fall. Discover that it’s possible to live with a different dogma.”

“Your ‘convincing’ came in the flavor of medical conspiracy.”

“Unorthodox avenue to your blood borne liberation.”

Will jutted out his jaw in a sort of sinister mocking. “I suppose you want to believe I'm lucky to be haunted by you. You'd feel jealous if some other violence did the haunting.”

Hannibal didn’t take his eyes off the road but got a little mirthier. “I find I'd be jealous if anyone else occupied your mind.”

“Is that even in your own best interest? My concept of you doesn’t involve soft rose vignetted memories.” _[Blood faucets and failures to forgive yourself.]_ Will didn’t look over. _That_ might bring about the carsickness.

There was a chuckle of acknowledgement. “Will, even if I'm only woven into you amongst threads of anger, I love the weaving. I love the product.”

“Do you love the man?” Will regretted saying it as soon as it was out of his mouth. Before he had even finished the words, he was wincing. 

The older man adjusted his mouth a bit before speaking. “That I don’t know. It’s possible I’m not sure what love looks like for men such as us. If there is a form of love, it’s among many, many more things.”

 _[Damning evidence for the imagined futures.]_ “That makes me feel… a little sick.” _[Call it: viscerally cautious and twisted by shame.]_

Hannibal seemed surprisingly unbothered. Amused, almost. “Disgust?”

Will sneered. “There are several kinds of sick. Brain inflammation, for example.”

The level of chipper skepticism, very annoyingly, increased. “So just a little of some sort of unidentifiable sick? Do you feel any other feeling at the thought of being the object of my love?”

“I’ve always been the object of you, Hannibal.” Will patted his own heart sarcastically.

“It was an unfortunate choice of words,” Hannibal conceded, officially looking amused. “Do you feel only sickness at the thought of being loved by me?”

_[I don’t fully know what kind of creature you are.]_ “It depends. How will this show? If we’re headed toward future manipulations, I’m not sure I’d be a fan. Just keep that in your pocket, doc.”

“Beyond just what I see as best for you,” Hannibal tried to focus harder on the road, “I will endeavor to give you more of what you want.”

“You’re too selfish for that.” It went whispered out the passenger side window, which was now foggy with breath from all of the distracted scenery watching.

“Am I?”

Will chuckled a little more coldly than he meant to. “You’ll give me ‘what I want’? What do you want me to want?”

Hannibal made a disapproving frown. “That’s quite evasive. What do _you_ want, Will? Without pretense or half-truths.”

“Aah,” Will nodded to himself. “You set me up to evade your own evasion. Clever. Okay, well, I’d want… to know what the ‘many, many more things’ are that you say your love’s _among_.” He laughed out, “I’m sure Jack, in some way, ‘loves’ me among his belief in my utility. My dogs love me among their needing me for their survival.”

Hannibal breathed a laugh, too. “If it helps, you have no utility to me and I do not depend on you for sustenance and shelter.” 

“True, a toy is not a utility.” A bitter bite.

A patronizing return. “Hmm, I notice you still refuse to allow compliments.”

Will whipped into focus at that. “I’m not responding with self deprecation. I’m deciding to pick this scab because I’m still tired.” _[And confused and confused.]_

A shared smile.

“I will make a mental note that you are grumpy in the morning in case our leaving together predicts future close quarters.” […] There was probably an hour of silence, so clearly filled with thinking that it wasn’t surprising that Hannibal picked up where they left off. “I enjoy seeing what you are and what you do without my many manipulations. It sits alongside music and art as one of my favorite inspirations.”

Will was not at all flattered, seeing right away their circling back to objectification. “I am not alive to create your marks on the world, Hannibal.”

“I never said you were the medium for it. You’re a piece to witness. One that I know will always drip with something new. Something to return to.” Another very long pause. “Either way, in the end, we are all one another’s tools for evolution.”

  
  
  


The thought warmed Will, shallow and deep. There in the car, these days were making a graveyard for all his attempts at nihilism. 

  
  


“Let’s just table this talk until we get to the motel tonight.”

“So you can pretend you are asleep?” Hannibal (accurately) quipped.

“I can pretend I’m asleep right now.” Will leaned his head against the window and saw the reflection of Hannibal’s soft smile.

  
  


\----***----

  
  


It was only 7:30pm but the storm made it feel like midnight and the virtually sleepless night before certainly didn’t help. Glowing vacancy neons colored the highway, refracting off the wet road. Within 20 minutes of seeing the exit ramp, they were settling into a double room on the second story of the first familiar chain that allowed pets.

The windows were getting smacked by the sideways rain, threatening to fracture. Hannibal pulled the opaque curtains closed once their shared table lamp was flicked on. Winston, with great attention to detail, took the opportunity to sniff every surface available to him at his height.

  
  
  
  
  


In the shower, Will paused his lathering for a moment to listen to the faucet’s purr, the sound of Hannibal brushing his teeth in the sink. It felt comfortably alien. Rain, sink, shower, all spitting at different frequencies. 

  
  
  


They switched places and soon Will found himself frozen on the edge of his bed. The squeak of the shower knob was followed by a soft “excuse me, dear,” which, at that volume, could only have been directed at a sleepy Winston blocking the doorway.

  
  
  


The doctor, towel wrapped around his waist, hair letting droplets run down his cheeks and neck, was thumbing through the hotel tea selection like a document drawer to lay out what he’d make in the morning.

Will watched him for a moment and, almost by accident, spoke what had stewed in him for weeks. “Y’know, for all your prepared musings on self-liberation, you can be blind to your own inaction.” He swallowed. “So careful to get in the way of any risk to your own control and revelation.”

Hannibal considered him for a moment, clearly teetering between a verbal and nonverbal continuation of the conversation they’d started in the car. He crossed the room, walking past his own bed to sit beside Will on his. He turned to speak, but Will stared down at the ugly carpet, leaving Hannibal only inches from his ear. “I find… myself spellbound by you, Will.” He leaned in to press his lips to Will’s bare shoulder, feeling the shared, freshly showered dampness. “To fully revisit our discussion in the car: I don’t know you well enough to be certain of what you would become in your life without my influence. I hardly know what you’ll become _with_ it. I can’t say all that you are. But I love the man I’ve come to know. From the deepest part of me.”

Will wanted so dearly to calm his heart rate but a shaky nod gave him away. He started very slow, “from what I know of your life, I would have thought all your gentleness was gone.”

“I didn’t say it was something gentle. Not in me, at least.” Hannibal spoke to the side of his face. “I am, like muscle tendon’d to bone, unable to be anywhere but right beside you.”

Undeniable heart rate uptick. “Trusting you… feels like going to sleep without putting out a campfire.”

Hannibal leaned in to whisper, “well, then I ask you, for some time, to be that foolish with me.”

_[He says he has a place for you. For the foreseeable future in all of its unforeseeable fragments.]_

  
  
  


Will turned toward him. “Would you read to me for a while?”

Hannibal didn’t feel disappointed - or all that surprised - by the avoidant pivot; it came warmly whispered into his hair, enough of a reciprocated intimacy that he’d live off it like food for a few days.

When he rose to his feet, Will climbed under the covers and shifted over toward the window, leaving room for the other man to join him, now with Will’s deeply worn paperback copy of Swann’s Way. 

Hannibal, after stepping into sweatpants, jokingly grunted as he hurled the book on the bed in all its 4100 pages – where it made a thud and pushed the air out of the duvet around it – and climbed in alongside Will.

As they’d been doing on their journey, he opened to a random page and began:

_“Though I might dedicate this year to Gilberte, though I might try to imprint upon New Year’s Day the special notion I had made up for it, as a religion is superimposed on the blind workings of nature, it was in vain: I was aw-”_

He paused for a moment when Will slunk an arm around his middle and put his face to his chest, repositioning to settle in for sleep. Hannibal continued on.

_“I was aware that this day did not know it was called New Year’s Day, and that it was coming to an end in the twilight in a way that was not unknown to me. What I recognized, what I sensed, in that mild wind blowing about the Morris column with its posters, was the reappearance of former times, with the never-ending unchangingness of their substance, their familiar dampness, their ignorant fluidity...”_

After a few pages, Hannibal was straining to read and Will took the book from his weakening grip and set it on the table by the lamp, which the older man switched off. Both conditioned to sleep to the sound of pages.

  
  
  


_[Campfire.]_

By morning, the rain would be swamping the parking lot and folding the flowers. And they’d be far away again.

\----***----

  
  


Bright gray filled the room the following day, rain falling in an occasional sheet off of what must be a warped roof. 

Hannibal spoke quietly from his place by the window when Will began to shift, “your son is still asleep.”

Will’s chest sharply stung with something unbearingly overtaking at the words in combination with the sight of the other man’s still haphazard, feathery bedhead.

_[Okay. Okay. Fine.]_

He reached up to mime for Hannibal to come back to bed. 

The man took the invitation to climb in beside him and Will moved to pull his thigh, tugging him into place above him instead. Clinging to Hannibal like his own personal southern humidity.

From above, Hannibal had several trains of thought run across his face at this gesture, though he managed to process the pull enough to catch his fall on his elbows.

Will briefly cracked one eye open again to look at him. “I’ll never understand people’s impulse to open the curtains when they wake up. Might as well douse me in ice water.”

Hannibal rumbled down at him, “I was trying to see if our car had floated away.”

“Did it?” Will smiled with his eyes closed and ran his hands up the other man’s back.

“Yes, unfortunately,” he whispered while he pressed his lips to Will’s eyelids.

Will was barely audible now, shifting to smile against the mouth above him: “that’s terrible.” There was a single shared breath before they fit their lips together, their legs sinking into place soon after.

They stayed there, slowly (though with very little gentleness) tasting each other, moving their hands wherever they could reach, when Hannibal circled his hips, drawing a grunt from Will’s throat. 

Naturally, Winston clicked into the room to find the source of the noise.

“Of course. Of _course_.” Will wiped his hands down his face.

While Hannibal quickly climbed out of the bed, he chirped, “I’m grateful for the interruption. I’d like to take my time with you.”

The younger man, leaning over to scratch around the intruder’s head, could only grin, jolted now further awake by the bluntness. 

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


The parking lot had become home to an impressive amount of gasoline iridescence and stagnant water, so much that Hannibal quickly thought to pick up Winston before his fur absorbed the stench for the drive. Their shoes and pants would be a different story. Those were probably headed in the same direction that their clothes went that night a few weeks ago: the fire. Will twirled the keys and opened the back for the dog to get comfortable. They’d find a patch of grass for him somewhere beyond the cigarette butt bayou around their hubcaps.

  
  


Everywhere smelled like mud – that flash flood hot-dirt-turned-cold-soil already shaping packed dust into small rivers. The air coming in through the windows was the sticky kind of humid – still too early in the year for mosquitos – and they held it like a film on their hair and skin. Winston was probably not having a great time, either, and Will apologetically brought him to a patch of kerb grass in a McDonald’s parking lot. Surely not the most criminal thing that the cashiers had seen through those windows. “Okay, first Louisiana,” Will huffed through the window while he toweled off Winston’s wet grassy paws, “then somewhere cold.”

Hannibal hummed an agreement. “After this morning, I’m reluctant to ever visit Venice again.”

Will smiled while he hurriedly shut the doors, pulled up all the windows, and blasted the AC. He’d barely clicked his seat belt into place before they tore out of that below sea level bacteria town. Winston really deserved special accolades for all of his general passivity during a probably very confusing couple of weeks. Especially now that it was about to get a hell of a lot hotter.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *  
> *  
> I have a tattoo of Appalachia lmao and had John Denver stuck in my head the whole time writing
> 
> Will Graham's two comfort zones are metaphors and getting stabbed


	6. Sticky Covington

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> contains homophobia, brief and mild violence

Sam waited until the food came before really saying much. “I appreciate you meeting me. Sorry I didn’t invite you out sooner, just, well you know. Doctorate.”

“I _do_ know.” Alana really wasn’t insecure enough to read into someone else’s hermit behavior, but her social network seemed to be withering these days and things were stinging more than they used to. With Will’s abrupt departure from the FBI and Hannibal’s busy schedule, she was pushed into the unloving embrace of coffee shops with colleagues and coffee shops alone. Getting asked to a brewery in her neck of the woods was refreshing. The soft shell crab was good, too. “So, Will getting called away? I feel like I shouldn’t ask you what happened but he doesn’t tell me much.”

Sam flashed her a joking pouty face. “Oh yeah, to be honest he never confided in me much either. I’ll miss him and his little family, though.”

Alana’s eyes flitted through several emotions, landing on humored confusion. “Sounds like you’re eulogizing him. Is he alright? I talked to him about a week ago.”

“Yeah, he’s fine… unless you know something I don’t.” Sam slurped down ice water to catch up with the spicy buffalo fries. “Seemed like he just needed a fresh start.”

Alana felt as though she had to whisper, “so, what, Will _moved?_ ” _[Ouch.]_

“I helped him rehome his dogs, yeah. Had to keep Buster in my orbit, though, so I got Carla to take him. I was curious about the sudden jet set for a guy like that, but we ended up getting drunk the last time I saw him, so I wasn’t in a position to connect dots.” She made an _oops_ face. “Have you talked to Hannibal about it?”

Something about a person saying his name with their lips glistening from buffalo chicken dip was hilarious to Alana. “Hmm. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised you’ve met Hannibal. I talked to him a few days ago, but he doesn’t know any more than I do.”

Sam’s eyes went into a squint and she gave a pitying head tilt. “Alana…”

“Sam…” Her eyes squinted, too.

“C’mon.” The younger woman tried to find a way to be less patronizing than she was definitely about to sound, “try being more direct the next time you talk to him.”

Alana flattened her lips in an uneasy smile. “I’m very direct. It’s kind of built into my reputation at the academy.”

Sam picked up her stout again and tilted the mug towards her. “Okay, then I will try directness: he’s lying to you.”

“I’ve known Hannibal for years. It seems–” _[no…]_ “so, did they leave together?” Alana, after noticing she’d abandoned her food to pursue this mystery, started to tear at a crab leg.

“I actually don’t know.” Sam replied, starting to gather that the story of this sudden move just got a little more interesting… “Will told me he didn’t have a plan for where he was headed yet, so there wasn’t a lot of even basic information to string together. But I’d bet if they aren’t together right this second, Hannibal knows - at the very least - _exactly_ where Will is.”

Alana licked her teeth. “I feel like I didn’t know him as well as I thought I did.” _[At least I’m not eulogizing him.]_

“Will might be one of those people you can’t really know. Hannibal certainly is. But despite it all, they’re under each other’s skin. No wonder they were so codependent.” Sam grinned a little. “Both total assholes but in different and creative ways.”

Alana shocked herself with a snort. “It’s funny that you saw them both in such a different element than I ever did, I guess.” _[Is that ‘funny’ or does it hurt a little?]_ “I - hmm, God - I need to not dwell on this before I have more details or I’ll go crazy.” She shook her head out. “Anyway, tell me about your time in Boston. You went home last month, right?”

Sam laughed at that and agreed to drop it. “Boston, hmm, well, for starters, if I had balls they’d have been huddled so deep inside me from the cold that I’d have thrown up.”

  
  


* * *

Around noon, the men finally crossed the Mississippi into Louisiana. The roads leading into Covington grew thinner and the speed limit was dropped dramatically. The smell of sun-warmed dust and willow trees was something that Will couldn’t describe but could identify in seconds. It quickly became so shrouded in gray clouds and willows that daytime turned into another kind of night. Even in the late winter, it was especially warm that day and the first drops of yet another rain shower hissed on the heat of the ground.

“Looks like we’re already down where the earth is hotter,” Hannibal mused. He noticed Will growing quieter as they approached. Not the look of tugged old scars, just the sight of a man in recollection.

Will gave back a distracted side smile and Hannibal pulled into the parking lot of an old white church.

The building was all wood, painted and repainted to hide its chipping and age. Bricks lined the road to protect the grove and a small pathway to the door was canopied by a line of eight heavy oaks with their branches tangled.

  
  


Will turned to the older man with a curdled look of disapproval. “Why are we here?” Something more eerie about wooden churches from 150 years ago than stone churches from 400 years ago. Like the wood soaked something up in all its pores. Like the closer it looks to a house, the more acutely aware he is of his discomfort. He walked Winston around the lot for a moment and looped his leash on the ‘No Outlet’ sign. Winston seemed to enjoy what slowed to a drizzle.

  
  
  


Hannibal opened the front door to the church, which had a knob fit for a bedroom. One of those details that are bizarre but banal enough that they’re not worth addressing. “I thought we might give ourselves a fitting introduction to the area.”

Will gave one last coo to Winston and followed the other man into the building. “Are you sure you’re not just here to ‘save’ me after all of your detail-oriented manipulations?”

The acoustics swallowed their voices but Hannibal moved closer to whisper anyway. “You have your illusions about the world, Will. Do you truly want to hold onto them all? I’ve drawn your attention to your _own_ glory.” His using the word in a church felt sacrilegious somehow.

The shorter man pulled them into the bathroom, square sinks and yellowing tiles would be more appropriate witnesses to their conversation than any members of the congregation. He still whispered. “What makes you so confident in your own design? That your decision to rid the world of disagreeable people is a noble extracurricular?” Will saw his own curls in the mirror and tried to undo what the rain had done.

Hannibal made eye contact with him in his reflection and washed his hands. “There’s nothing noble or righteous about what I do. Nor what the FBI does. Nor the clergy. Ideas of nobility and righteousness can be traced back to beliefs in prophets, which I am not, and higher faiths, which I do not have.” He dried his hands. “If there is a God, He is the most wicked Thing we can imagine.”

Seemed like the curls were as good as they’d get. “Your point being that you are not greater than man, but you are in a position to decide who is lesser than man.”

Hannibal looked up from where he was fiddling with his sleeves. “Reductive.”

Will chuckled and quickly countered, “religion is reductive. All of the supposed fables and virtues could fit in books.”

Hannibal returned the small smile. “And when the books were too long, ten bullet points were made to fit on tablets of stone.”

“Every book has to have SparkNotes.” Will smiled brightly. It was getting a little cynical for the locale.

  
  


They returned to the panting dog, who had wound his leash twice around the sign in the few minutes he was unsupervised (no doubt from sniffing the wet grass in a circle). It was time they gave Winston a real, honest to God walk after all these stunted breaks from the trip. As they approached the grounds, Will realized that what he thought was a magnolia grove was a cemetery full of filtered light and other signs of life continued. Made him feel profoundly unimportant in a weight-relieving way. _[_ _Things that were true when last you thought them, aren’t true anymore.]_ He always hated seeing headstones chiseled with a date of birth and date of death within a couple years of each other. Seems like we’re always at a dying age. _[God, how long has that been beautiful?]_

  
  
  
  
  
  


Hannibal was unsurprised to see who was making a follow up call. 

“Hello, Alana.”

“Hannibal, hi. So,” she paused to school her impending accusation, “the other night when you suggested you had very little information about Will’s situation…” 

Hannibal withheld a sigh. “I didn’t want to color his lingering reputation at the academy by confirming that he left for a non-emergency.”

Alana’s tone was unsuccessfully controlled. “There’s a _‘For Sale’ sign_ in front of his house.”

“Yes.”

A scoff. “And if I went to Baltimore, I’d find a similar sign in front of yours?”

“Yes, well, identical. We share an agent.” He chuckled. She didn’t like that.

“Can you please tell me what’s going on? Is there something that makes this all make sense?” A heavy exhale. “The first, of course, is Will okay?”

Hannibal looked over at Will, who was pretending he had a ball in his hand, about to make a fool of the dog. “Yes, he’s alright. Our Will just needs to give a chance to who he is without all of the shadows.”

“The next question is so strangely apparent that I am reluctant to ask. Where are you going and how long will you be gone?”

Hannibal hid his impulse to tease her for her nearly indignant confusion before he effortlessly spun his web. “I have a timeshare here in Olympia and we’ve discussed staying indefinitely.” He tried to sprinkle in a professionally solemn voice. “I’ve rerouted my patients through the hospital, so you might be able to reach out to a few if you’re looking for clients.”

“Okay, um, thank you? It’s nice to be looped in, even if it’s only after I bug you.” The lighthearted tone she attempted didn’t do much to cloak her undercurrent of confused loneliness. “I’m glad you’re… making sure Will is alright.”

“I will let you know whenever I’m in town, Alana.” Thrown bone. How poetically mirrored the conversation became to whatever was going on in his peripheral vision.

“That’s quite a loose rain check, but deal.” A rhythm of skepticism. “Have a good night, Hannibal.”

“Good night, Alana.”

He turned the screen off, making a mental note that this plan was only a few mollifying phone calls away from new papers, new technology, and new scenery. The rest of the potential rug pulls for their past lives would happen while they were long gone. Will continued to not notice him. It was rare to see the man completely inside one train of thought. If this was Will with dogs, Hannibal would get him more dogs.

  
  


\----***----

The road into Covington alternated between dusty and flooded and their rental was taking a beating. Will recalled meeting Oswald once at his watering hole in town back when Beau died and, on a hunch and pure muscle memory, he drove right to that familiar gravel parking lot. 

Will went in alone. (Townie eyes always got stuck on Hannibal.) The pub was stifling from the first second - Johnny Cash howled through all of the chatter and the kitchen’s clanging dishware. Warm with all its kind filth.

  
  


A server behind the bar called to him while he drifted in, “hey honey. Ça va?”

He suddenly felt acutely aware of how little of him was who he used to try so hard to be. “Ça va. Is Oswald Graham around?”

The woman set her booklet down and took a longer look at Will. “Ozzie was in this morning. Funny you’re here ‘cause we don’t see him much anymore. I’m Winnie, by the way.”

Will gave a tight-lipped grin at her name, thinking of the pair outside. “Uh, thanks. Thank you.”

She stopped him before he looked completely deflated, “oh, y’know what,” she tapped her forehead and then pointed outside. “He goes next door a lot. Likes to chat up the lady at the laundromat.”

That sounded about right. “Um. Thanks, Winnie.” He thought he’d toss her that familiar shallow Southern kindness and he slid out the door again within the minute.

Hannibal, who was running a finger in a circle on Winston’s head, looked up at the swinging door. The other man thumbed toward the laundromat and they headed over together. Sure enough, Oswald, looking sickly aged but with all of the same pure slime, had his elbow resting on one of the dryers, chatting with, and likely bothering, a woman easily 20 years younger than him.

Most people in the business looked up when the front door jingled.

“ _Oswald_.”

  
  
  


\----***----

Oswald only kept his veiled disdain for a few minutes of patronizing exchanges and then trailed off while he walked them back to the gravel lot behind the strip. A moment after they stepped into the shadow of their SUV, Hannibal took an appropriately biblical approach to luring him in with them. Hit him in the temple with a rock.

  
  
  
  
  


About ten minutes out of town, now back into the flat and green parts that lead to the river, they pulled down Oswald’s long driveway. 

  
  
  
  


He woke up hogtied in his own electrical cords and on his own dirty tile floor. Drool dripped from his mouth and his eyes dragged around slowly to piece together where he was.

“Always were a scrappy one, Billy.” He gargled out and looked at Hannibal. “And always were a pillow-biter.”

Will laughed with a far depth of spite. “I see you’ve graduated to modern times. No more ‘sodomite’?”

Oswald was gathering more strength. “They’ll call you that at the gates. Down here I’ll say as I please.”

Will shook his head. Same old chatty man.

“And that’s not all you were. You remember. Does he know who you are?” Oswald flicked his head to indicate Hannibal before continuing his belligerent little grasp for the upperhand. “Unpatriotic, a non-believer. Didn’t listen to your daddy. Quit your gig as a cop. Laid your whole life on your own perverted sense of right and wrong. See where it gotchya. That why the gov’ment dint want you as an agent? In their guts they saw backwards on your blasphemin’.”

Will breathed out an agitated puff of ragged air. He wished Oswald didn’t have that vile talent of his, his profound ability to scalpel into Will’s head. 

His uncle, foolishly, kept pouring out, “sat beside your friends like the dogs they were. Couldn’t hardly tell you ‘part. Wicked dirty thing you were. Angry then and angry now ‘cause you’ve got evil in your belly.”

Hannibal chimed in from behind Will. “Even the devil was a fallen angel who punishes wrongdoers. Moral compasses share no magnet.”

Oswald raised his voice after a cackle. “Yeah. Angel Lucifer fell from Grace when he was rejected by his family, too. Sits right alongside those sinners in the fire, doesn’t he? Though, I s’pose _you_ never had a grace to fall from, Billy. Tried for a sec to climb to it, dintchya?”

Will adjusted his own neck side to side and took a step closer. “I wonder, uncle Oswald. How badly you want to go to heaven. Pity.”

Oswald stayed silent, unsure of what would come next.

Will kicked him in the neck to send him choking. And not talking. He turned to speak to Hannibal, “all cultures require the threat of punishment. Maybe the devil is a man about town.” A shared grin.

  
  


Hannibal reached out his hand to motion for him to come closer. “Time does not revolve or repeat; but phenomena gather new names.”

Will crossed the room and spoke softly, “new interpretations.”

“Argument enough that we can be the interpreters if we choose. Are there any reasons known to _you_ to resist your temptations without your inner laws tied back to scripture?”

Will donned a nose-flaring frown at the doctor. “How do I know these temptations are even my _own_?”

The taller man got a flicker of a smile. “Hobbs gave you a sweet satisfaction that you’ve been chasing ever since. How did you feel when you killed the captors? Our night in Virginia.”

  
  


Will shook.

“Like I created the… purest honesty on earth.”

“That is you interpreting. Interpreting the men into better use.” Hannibal stepped forward until they could feel each other’s voices. “Interpreting your power into better use.”

Will looked away at nothing. “We just scarred and dumped their bodies.”

Hannibal ran his knuckles along the shorter man’s temple. “A haiku. Not a waste at all, considering where we are now.”

“It wasn’t reckless or poetic.” Will turned his head for a second, forcing out an exhale. “I just wanted to force my own hand.”

“I know.” He retracted his touch and stood straighter. “Why?”

The younger man looked over at the foul thing on the floor. “We’re given opportunities to mess our lives up. And… I needed to take that one.”

“A burnt bridge to prevent your return to the old Will Graham.” Hannibal tilted his head in a subtle way as though looking through the month again. “What is your next creation? What do you have planned for this one?”

  
  


They both looked down at Oswald, who appeared resigned to his fate. Though definitely the type to fight back with all the rest he had. At least the type to try one last kick or headbutt and get it out of his system.

Will stepped over him and observed him for a moment. “Can you swim?”

  
  


* * *

  
  


Sam flip-flopped on messaging Alana for about 30 minutes, eventually landing on self-care and manners. God dammit.

_[5:32PM] Ok I’m a dick for this but I have to cancel tonight_

**[5:36PM] No problem, I had to clean my place anyway. Everything fine?**

_[5:37PM] Totally fine! I forgot I had to stay home and be depressed. Should have made a note_

**[5:37PM] Well I took this picture of Applesauce this morning. I usually don’t let him in bed but I’m going easy on him \img.41\**

_[5:39PM] Hello Apple S. Bloom_

_[5:40PM] Here are my boys \image.251\_

_[5:41PM] left to right: Saturn, Yogurt, Nur, Khubz_

**[5:44PM] Well behaved? Explain the last two names.**

_[5:56PM] Calmed down a lot now that there’s no snow for them to rage in. And khubz is a type of flatbread (yemeni is implied cuz that’s the only valid khubz) and Nur is my sister’s name. I thought it would be funny to name my dog after her to piss her off_

**[5:56PM] Did it?**

_[5:59PM] Every time she visits. Gift that keeps on giving_

**[6:02PM] Let me know if I’m crossing a line, but if you don’t want to leave your apartment but want company, I can come over there.**

_[6:03PM] Please yes. If you see me cry during the movie I literally have to kill you. Literally_

_[6:03PM] Don’t bring the alc_

**[6:04PM] I understand & I understand. I’ll leave in 10**

\----***----

  
  


Sam woke Alana with a tug on her ear lobe.

Alana opened one eye and groaned fondly. If they weren’t careful, it could all get so comfortable. Staying busy and waterlogged with work keeps things simple, contained, concise. But no one could plan for a Sam. 

Sam, in her surface joy and erratic schedule. Sam, in her texts-you-back-right-away and knows-she’s-beautiful. In her Boston accent, in her ‘gin makes me slutty’, in her mole right in the center of her sternum. Snuck out to a Vanessa Carlton concert with her cousins once. Sam in all of her peanut butter stouts and falling asleep in public. If all you do is talk about the weather, she makes you care about the weather.

Sam noticed her staring and raised a teasing eyebrow. “So, you were saying that Hannibal told you they were in some sex bungalow in Seattle, right?”

Alana scrunched her face at the image of her former mentor and her former crush getting sweaty together. “I believe I said the words ‘timeshare in Olympia’, so, yes.” She laughed.

“Right, so in that case, I thought you might be interested in this little exchange I just had before you woke up.” She grabbed her phone from where it laid between them. “This is with Will by the way.”

  
  


_[7:58AM] When my lease is up I’m rooming with Carla_

_[7:58AM] Which means the boys are officially under the same roof as busted_

_[7:59AM] Buster*_

**[8:02AM] New place? Tired of sleeping in the same room as your fridge?**

_[8:02AM] Why are you up so early lol farmer john_

**[8:04AM] 8 isn't that early**

  
  


Sam rolled onto her stomach and perched on her forearms. “It would have been _five in the morning_ on the west coast. He’s still in the same time zone. Might not have left the area. Dun Dun Dun.”

Alana put her fingers to her forehead. It was getting easier for her to cope with being out of the loop. In fact, it was nice to be investigating a type of mystery that didn’t involve serial killers for once. “What the _hell_ is going on?”

Sam clicked her screen off again and shook her head. “Not sure why they’re on the lam from _us_. I get the whole ten-foot-pole thing with bad jobs but, truly, what the fuck?”

There was a pause with bugging eyes of _'the plot thickens...'_ before they relaxed into an _'I guess we'll see...'_  
  


“Hey,” the younger woman spoke in a self-conscious whisper, “I am logically aware that you’re a full expert in behavioral health and everything. But I still have a _visceral_ impulse to apologize about last night.” Candor was worth a shot. She knew Alana was some kind of sad, too. Someone who defaulted on melancholy and just took life as strings of little distractions. Sam attracts those types. The first time they had sex, Alana held her in a way that made Sam feel like someone else’s ghost. It didn’t feel so bad, really. Something probably rattles in us all.

“Mmm.” Alana rolled onto her side to get a better look at her. “I knew you would say that.”

Sam sighed, a little embarrassed, and continued, “spring is a little sad, right? Transitional seasons are the hardest on me. I try not to sink in on myself. Be present for people, et cetera.”

“You’re not on earth to make people feel good.” Alana raised her eyebrows a little suggestively despite the subject gravity and ran a fingernail down the other’s arm. “Just because I enjoy your company doesn’t mean you have to be my medicine.”

Sam, not used to such blunt kindness, joined Alana on her pillow. “Can I tell you a secret?”

Alana squinted. “Yes.”

“I almost named all four of my dogs variations on the name ‘Sam’ but my friend talked me out of it.”

Alana laughed loudly at the ceiling, willing to let the woman deflect emotional vulnerability before coffee. “Well, your friend clearly doesn’t have your instinct for comedy.”

“Clearly.” Sam kissed her shoulder. “One more thing.” She ran a squeezing hand up her back. “Brace yourself, because this might absolutely _floor_ you,” she pretended to breathe shakily, “but I’m wary of intimacy.”

Alana responded sarcastically, “wow, you hide it well.”

Sam’s face crinkled. “I can’t help it or I tell myself I can’t. And - _don’t get me wrong_ \- casual things can be lovely. But I do want to know you.”

_[See all her memories and other ornaments.]_

“I’d like that. A lot.” Alana tugged her by her ugly t-shirt to tangle their legs together. “I’ll get started on a rough draft of my memoirs later this week.”

“ _Alana Bloom: A Partial History._ ”

“Your feet are freezing.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Old candles are made with a long string and you dip it in hot wax then ice water then hot wax then ice water etc. That's how I'm choosing to tell this story lmao


	7. Moss and Dilution

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Graphic violence  
> this chapter is shorter and sandwiched between two more gentle ones intentionally

*

*

*

Hannibal rolled over at the feeling of the bed shifting. “How long have you been awake?”

Will smiled at his sleepy expression, scooting down to lay beside him again. “Not too long, had to let Winston out. He’s enjoying all the space here.”

The older man tugged him closer and buried his face in his hair, humming thoughtfully. “Did you eat? We have a big day ahead.” He pulled back to look at him, getting a few chins to do it. “You seem rather reflective.”

“Just been –” Will rolled closer to return to the spot against his chest. “– thinking.”

“Reconsidering?” Hannibal knew that was not the implication, but opportunities to be contrarian were the best way to drag the truth out of Will.

Despite crushing himself into the other man’s chest, his voice came out clear and matter-of-factly as though they were seated at the table. “Sam said she’s moving.”

“Mmm. You are remembering that time didn’t stop there.”

Will pulled back to look at him again, adding, “things change without me watching. Like sleeping while the sun sets. Seems a little sad to not see it even though you know it will happen every day.”

Hannibal kneaded the meat of his shoulder. “You are changing, too.”

Chuckling at the other man’s morning voice, Will shook his head slowly. “How do _you_ do this? Become new?”

“I return to places. I change and they do, too. New faces in old cities, new highways built over what was once grass - but the bones of it all remain. As do mine.” He continued kneading Will’s muscles all the way down to his glutes. “Before we start the day, I would like to say that I do hope someday soon we might revisit what we started in the motel room.” He mouthed at the shell of his ear.

Will surprised himself with a smile despite all of his occupying thoughts. He wanted to stay in bed, too, but this was not his home and there would never be enough quiet in this place so long as the man in the front room writhed on the tiles. They waited a moment and reluctantly got to their feet.

  
  


\----***----

  
  
  


Will dropped a decorative ceramic plate on the floor beside Oswald’s head to wake him. The man jolted and breathed around the cloth gag. He looked down at himself, noticing he was now in a bright white shirt. It wouldn’t be too much of a leap to guess what his nephew had planned for the day.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


The river was muddy and all swampland up to the banks. They stepped through the bars of shade from the tupelo gums and old cypresses. Now in the part of the bank where things were planted by accident, carried and nourished by the stomachs of some other animals. It was all so green. Even the moss felt old. The brown waters were glinting and gentle around their ankles, Oswald was barefoot and dragged along, soles of him all cut up by wet roots.

  
  
  
  
  


Will’s brain supplied all of the river hymns he worked so hard to not absorb over the years. Baptist culture really runs like an electrical current through the South, all of the radio stations force feeding you with it every Sunday and Friday.

  
  


_[‘ere we reach the shining river lay we every burden down,_

_grace our spirits will deliver and provide a robe and crown,_

_gather with the saints at the river that flows by the throne of god]_

  
  


The more they drudged through the swamp water, the more the all too familiar songs began to haunt the splashing silence. Will wanted to speak over the music, to say something - anything - aloud to interrupt the hum through the swamp. He wondered if Oswald heard it, too.

  
  


_[As I went down in the river to pray, studyin’ about that good ol’ way and who shall wear the starry crown,_

_good Lord, show me the way._

_Oh, brother let’s go down, let’s go down, c’mon down. Oh brothers let’s go down. Down in the river to pray._

_Oh, sinners let’s go down, let’s go down, don’t you wanna go down. Oh, sinners let’s go down. Down in the river to pray.]_

  
  
  


Hannibal, with a nod from Will, pushed the old man against the rough bark of a gum tree, forearm to his throat. Oswald went still, understanding right away that any struggle would mean a throttling by his own work. His eyelashes were catching the raindrops that made it through the canopy of trees. 

Will, not blinking despite the rain, flicked out a hunter’s blade and pulled up his uncle’s shirt to reveal his heaving and liver spotted stomach. He made one last moment of eye contact with his uncle to say _‘you know your fate. I’m gonna change you the way you changed me’_. He wouldn’t cut too deep, just enough for him to bleed. Enough to scar if this was a world in which he lived that long.

At the first letter, Oswald’s breathing grew panicked, approaching hyperventilation, and he held back grunts.

At the next two, his suppressed grunts were turning into suppressed wails and his legs started to kick. He realized soon enough that it would only make the minutes longer. Hannibal moved his forearm down to push across Oswald’s chest, using the other hand to fill the spot on his throat. He wouldn’t choke him – even if the man was his alone – he wouldn’t choke him.

Oswald’s eyes lolled and he rested his head against the bark, opting for breathing heavily through his nose. That would get him through the pain, but not the next hour. It was clear he started a silent prayer between gasps, though he was certainly asking the wrong god for forgiveness.

  
  


Will and Hannibal admired the work: R - E - P - E - N - T, all letters carved about 2 inches in height, curving around the man’s abdominal muscles. Even if the man didn’t know the word that was cut into his skin, he knew the thought that cut it. Then Will tugged the shirt down again before nodding to keep going. They were only a matter of feet from the edge of the river and they moved along, more quickly now, and, once they were up to their hips in it, they lay Oswald to float on his back.

It was quite the sight. A solemn man hyper-aware of his own mortality, looking up at the clouds that would not part for him, at the rain that would not stop for him. His shirt was soaked with his own blood, the waters pulling the letters further through his now transparent white shirt. The word flowed and flowed down his sides. 

  
  


As he stared down at the man, the choir of cultural recollection in Will’s head crooned on.

_[Are your garments spotless? Are they white as snow? Are they washed in the blood of the lamb?]_

  
  


He laid a hand to grip the back of his uncle’s head. “Oswald, you know as well as I do that no one is gonna call on you. No hospice bills in the mailboxes of the ones that love you. No missing persons filed. You won’t come up in minds or conversations.” He adjusted the grip on his skull to get a clearer look into his eyes. “You’re probably right, maybe I was born with something bad in my belly. But you will die as you were in life. Pale and half-drowning, though this time with the Mississippi rather than scotch. All your blood running from you. And covered in flies.”

Will was spitting through a sneer. “You know what you're guilty of. You’ll be made immaculate by nothing. Certainly no amount of prayer.”

Hannibal looked up at Will for a moment through his brow, seeing a glimpse at a tale that he might have meant to be muffled by the now pouring rain.

The younger man went on, “you think the river will cleanse all that away? Not what a river does. It’ll never learn your name. Just washes your blood along like clay and leaves.”

When Will raised the blade again, Hannibal tilted Oswald’s chin up slightly, the man’s eyes losing fight, making space for Will to drag the blade across his neck. Shallow enough that it echoed a decapitation without the gentle gift of a quick death.

His eyes stared up at nothing. His mouth hung open so wide it looked like a final attempt to catch rain. As though he was still speaking but made quiet by the downpour.

  
  


Before they pushed him out to the faster current, Hannibal paused. “Do you wish this to be un-witnessed?”

Will looked down at the man, his blood now diluting out to catch on all three of them, making a trail in the flow. “The water will be the bed he lays in.”

“No one will find him but the flies.” Hannibal smirked back, though muted by something else.

Will scoffed with bright bitterness. “Two elements of horrible death: bleeding slowly and forgotten quickly.”

  
  
  
  


While they made their way back to the house, Will looked up at Hannibal, sifting through his own contemplation. 

Hannibal’s face didn’t change, but the life in his eyes did for a second. “What are you thinking?”

Will pulled his fingers through the swamp water before meeting his gaze. “There’s something so ancient about us. About this.” He splashed the water a little boyishly before rinsing his knife. “It’s beautiful.”

  
  


\----***----

Hannibal started the shower and pulled himself out of his clothes wet with rain and river and mud and the dead. Will followed soon after, dropping his clothes in the same pile to be put into flames.

The men both stepped into the narrow curtained shower, the hot water a sharp contrast to their day in the Mississippi. Hannibal picked up the shampoo he pulled from the motel, and lathered it over his fingers before running his hands through Will’s hair. He massaged it in, cupped his hands to fill with the spray, and rinsed his curls over and over until they clung to nothing. When Will turned to face him, Hannibal’s eyes were bright and worshiping. As though he saw completely through his gaze and back into his skull. The shorter man couldn’t gather a word to say before he turned Hannibal around and washed his hair, too, smiling when he found a few pieces of leaves. The day challenged even primal rules. Abandonment of the kin into the merciless flood. 

And now the smell of moss and metal was replaced with the civility of white tea conditioner and aloe body wash. Pressed in with careful fingers and buzzing adoration, rinsed out with the same. It would all be far away soon. They would take the loved muscle with them to be in a home somewhere, thawing by a fire. Expanding in warm breath and all the tranquility born from distance in the way dough swells in the oven.

Under the spray, they glided their hands around the newly clean skin and wound into a gripping embrace, mouths to the other’s pulse. Will wasn’t sure when he started crying, but something like tears poured from him now through shaking sobs. The man in his arms held him through it, his breathing heavy against him. His grip tightened, pulling their bare bodies flush at the temple, the neck, the chest, the stomach, the groin, the thighs, the calves. As his shaking slowed, Will was reminded of Plato.

His breathing returned to near normal, allowing him to look at their feet as though he’d see something of himself washing off. Change tore through life. Clumsy, yes, but not unconscious. 

_“What spring does to the cherry trees,”_ Hannibal whispered.

  
  
  
  
  


When their day was swallowed by the shower drain and the rest by gas fed combustion, Hannibal ran through the agenda for their next few days several times, making tweaks as he considered clever red herrings. He brought them oranges to eat. Will watched Winston chase a pair of butterflies, grinning with all the round relief after all the grisly. It was so easy. What used to be in him that made this imagined world seem impossible from the outside? _[It was being on the outside.]_

  
  


\----***----

Minutes after they started their drive, Will’s phone shone through his jeans’ pocket.

“Jack?”

A raggedy old exhale. “Will, it’s good to hear your voice.”

“Aww, miss me already?” He could feel Hannibal's grin without looking over and Jack’s frown without hearing the sigh.

“No, we’ve got bodies. Looks like multiple weeks of de-comp, but it’s hard to say considering the freezing temperatures. Hiker found them and local PD doesn’t have the hands for this.”

Will pushed his palm into his eye, knowing already what and who they found. “I don’t–”

“–work for the FBI anymore, I know,” Jack finished, impatient as ever. “It’s here in Virginia, Will. And it’s clever, but I’m not sure if it’s the Ripper’s brand of clever.”

“What makes you think it’s him, then?” Will massaged his forehead with his index finger.

“Surgical precision. Zee said it’s directly overlaid on the circulatory system. Post-mortem so it was relatively bloodless.”

“So… gather evidence and carry on the FBI’s tradition of never finding him.”

Will heard the sigh this time.

“He couldn’t have done this alone. His profile is extensive, Will, but not with variables like this. He had help.”

“Please don’t get me involved in this, Jack. I’m not even associated with FBI payroll anymore, so find a profiler who, I don’t know, _is_.”

“Dr. Lecter?”

Will bit down hard and fast on a laugh so it didn’t come out through his voice. “... yes. Dr. Lecter would be a good idea. Goodbye, Jack.”

  
  


Hannibal didn’t look in Will’s direction before quipping, “an argument in favor of faking one’s own death.”

“You’re pulling over because…”

“He is going to call the moment after he informs his team that he could not get a hold of you.”

They looked at one another impatiently.

“I told him you were a good option assuming you would screen his call.”

Hannibal gave him a disapproving look and pulled back onto the road. His phone lit up within the same minute. He would feel more confident if they were getting on a plane at the moment, “How long does fingerprint processing take?”

“They’ll send them to the lab. It’s on the same campus.” Will chewed his lip. “That’ll be late tonight. So processing will be tomorrow morning. At the earliest.”

Hannibal tilted his head around in thought. “And the latest?”

Will hummed. “Longest I’ve ever seen it take at Quantico was three days.” They made nearly humored eye contact regardless. “We’ll be planes and trains away before our names even get out around Virginia.”

  
  


Before getting fully on the road to Houston, they stopped at the train station in Baton Rouge, placing their fully silenced, fully charged phones under the seat of a Chicago-bound train. With (albeit unintentionally) muddied stories and muddier cell tower tracking, their trails would be thrown before security tapes and rental car data was even petitioned. Certain things couldn’t be helped, but a great many things could be fucked with.

  
  
  


\----***----

Will flipped through the documents (which were over-nighted to a Houston FedEx by a very briefly alluded to “Baltimore friend”). _[So he had some of these before?]_ Will vowed to save his questions until some time in the distant future when he was confident he’d get more than a cryptic answer. These hardly qualified as _suspiciously_ withheld pieces of information, considering the rugs were pulled between them, so Hannibal was just keeping a grip on his little mysteries, a comfort zone.

On the French passport, a picture of a young Hannibal appeared next to the name “Isaac Abreo” and, on the Canadian passport, Will’s image next to “Rene Gabriel”. He frowned at the ugly old picture of himself before wondering if any good pictures of him exist.

“Isaac Abreo, 47. Rene Gabriel, 38. So what is our relationship? Anything on paper?” He looked at Hannibal with an almost accusatory stare.

“It was easier to file for your synthetic identity without binding documents to my _authentic_ identity.” Hannibal glanced back at Winston, whose little brow perked up with the attention. “This young man does not speak Lithuanian, so he will have to be from your side of the family."

Will smiled toward the road. “A cousin.”

  
  



	8. Skin of the Tooth

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [ I painted Sam](https://jaydeclan.tumblr.com/post/643359893240348672/samina-sam-qudsi-original-character) so that's sort of how I view her while writing but she could look a lot of ways.  
> im gonna be honest i didn't proofread this chapter but i needed to pop it out before classes take grip of my ass this week

“Have you thought of any charming anecdotes to share with me?” Sam looked up from her cup to prod Alana. They’d both resolved to stop drinking but, unfortunately, Sam remembered she actually didn’t like coffee shop coffee. She preferred her coffee stirred in and hidden by off brand creamers. 

“Hmm.” Alana bit her cheek in a smile. “Charming? Probably not.”

“No quirky memories of getting your tongue stuck to a frozen pole?” She squinted in a teasing challenge. “The age you were when you learned light-years is a measure of distance. The age you were when you found out that’s the only measure that isn’t arbitrary.”

Alana wondered how much a person has to like someone before sharing tiny memories is interesting. She wondered if Sam liked her that much or was just trying to see if she did. _[Do surface friends fall so hard?]_

Sam tapped her on the knuckles like she was ringing a doorbell. “C’mon, you work people out of their scarring all the time. You should know by now where stories start.”

Alana lifted her mug in _‘cheers’_ as though it were a pint. “Touché. Well, my parents had me young. My mom and I fought a lot. I was a lot more like my dad.” She twisted her head back and forth and smiled at her own mind. “They fought a lot, too.” Bringing her cup to her lips, she added, “still together, though.”

“You had only brothers, right? What was that like?” Sam grimaced at the thought of how a boy would have been socialized in her household. Dead weight to the family dynamic.

“Not what you might think. My dad was kind of quiet and bookish, so there wasn’t much of a tense of rowdy masculine energy in the house.”

“Thank God.”

“It taught me not to be so eager to please.”

“A healthy trait." Sam turned her head side to side. "Being surrounded by men didn’t really change once you got into medicine.”

“Correct, and having only brothers definitely prepared me for the gross stuff, too. No sports obsession or purity-protecting mentality, but they were definitely all disgusting. A very biological household,” she laughed brightly. “You were raised in the same house as your cousins, right?”

“Yeah, it was my parents, me, my sister, my mom’s sister, and her two kids.” Sam’s eyes bugged out at how wild it sounded now. “Oh, and my dad’s mom.”

“All under one roof. Jeez.” Alana laughed at how… truly exhausting it must have been.

“It was cozy. It’s strange to think of myself.” Sam swallowed a too-big-too-hot gulp of her coffee. “As I was then. I remember thinking ‘what else is there?’ ‘what is lacking?’”

Alana could relate. She was opting to not ruin Sam's uncharacteristic spree of emotional honesty by pointing out that her hair was tangled around the hearing aid she hates wearing. “And did you find out?”

“I think I’m getting a sense of things. But certainly a little distance helps.” Her eyebrows went up in a fake guilty face.

“I understand that." Alana tapped the side of her mug and thought of her own life. "None of your own goals in the color of what you think they want.”

“I’m definitely soggy with the colors of them but I identify, divide out, unlearn. Live a life in a beautiful scandal, you know the rest.” She twirled around her hand dismissively out of faked flippancy.

Alana looked at her a little longer than she needed to. _[Science-oriented by lyrical brain? Emotionally competent just pathologically guarded.]_ “All of our divine scandals in just being alive.”

“To what we take with us.” Sam raised her mug to clink against Alana’s.

Alana joined her. “Whether we want to or not.”

They both swigged with grins.

Sam's tongue went out a little childishly in rejecting the high quality coffee. Gas station, Folgers, or no deal. They wouldn't be coming here again. “An odd transition but, thanks for taking Harley. I was in a bit of a panic trying to re-home her again and Will isn’t answering anything.”

Alana nodded while she swallowed, “my pleasure. Everything has been a little odd lately."

  
  


\----***----

It was strange to fly into the antique edges of Lyon from the swampiest stretch of the Bible belt.

Flying in, Hannibal told him about his family he’ll have to visit in France, about the arrangement he had with the university in Grenoble for potential winter lectures. He told Will about the second orphanage that took him. About covering the wall facing his bed from floor to ceiling in his drawings, like a paper quilt. How the image of that wall is the end of a particular corridor in his mind palace. It seemed that he often has more to say about the doors and hallways than he does about his memories themselves.

Hannibal explained that its construction began when he was quiet to himself; many of the memories are solely in the sounds of his footsteps and the indiscernible murmured prayer of others. How sometimes he hears Will’s footfalls ahead of him. How he may not have been made of ledges and fault lines like Will had, but he was made of far more ghosts.

From the airport, it was a train to Marseilles and a cab to their rental house. All of the roads were shrouded in the shadows of tangled branches. It was an odd mixture of thin pines and tall trees with deep red bark. The occasional set of palm leaves jutting out of the gate in front of someone’s home. It all felt so manicured that even the security bars over apartment windows were derelict in a way that looked intentional.

Unlike the brine-y Atlantic and the polluted waterways of the Rustbelt, the Mediterranean air that swept through the city just smelled warm and salted in a gentle way. He can picture them both here. Hair going bright in the sun, skin freckling and the golds of them deepening. Hair going gray, skin wrinkling. Will knew he was not indulging his usual self-sabotage when he halted that thought process. There would of course be a catch. He didn’t even know if he’d survive this killer, if they would both spend their days in different prisons.

Or maybe over time they’d just lose interest in each other or, better yet, one or both of them fall down the stairs and break their necks later this week. There were so many unknowns and very few inevitables. _[What if one day you like your life? Would that be so taboo?]_ Maybe that was something everyone was learning: actual joys beyond stale contentedness always come with a little risk to one’s self. It has to.

  
  


\----***----

Their town home was seated near the city center, though out far enough in the direction of the suburbs that it had a fenced yard behind it. A fence of real clay brick that was taller than either of them. The yard had a mixture of planters and natural growth, which together gave it a very distinctly Mediterranean appearance.

Will sat their limited luggage down, fighting the immediate temptation to sprawl out on the cool floor, and opting instead to show Winston the backyard and to feed him a torn wad of store bought sausage. They’d go shopping in the morning. He set out a bowl for water and one of his rattier shirts. He honestly didn’t think that he’d have to be separate from him for so long, and Will was experiencing a little postpartum anxiety.

  
  


Hannibal held out a hand to pull Will up to stand in front of him. They gazed around the other’s face. It had been days since their kiss and, while they’ve since shared far more intimate and carnal moments, that avenue in particular was begging to be revisited. 

He kissed the shorter man’s forehead and mumbled down at him as though someone might have been listening, “I’m glad we could wait until things quieted a bit.”

Will smiled and whispered, “the time you mentioned wanting… what will you do with it?”

Hannibal picked up his arm by the wrist and pressed a kiss to Will’s palm, smelling him at his pulse point there. “I’d like to have a shower before getting into bed.”

Will tried with all of his energy not to look defeated. “Uh, me too.”

“Good. It was an invitation.” A glinting grin.

  
  


They climbed the stairs slowly, both far away from cautiousness at this point, and navigated easily to the bathroom attached to the bedroom. _[Hm. Hot water that didn't smell like rust? Foreign subtance.]_

The taller man started the shower, making quick work of his own buttons. The bathroom was a mixture of modernity and a few details leftover from its days as an old farmhouse before the city grew around it, namely, deep green and orange tiles covering the walls. It was much finer than the one at Oswald’s place, and had a spacious shower with a clouded sliding glass door. Hannibal held up a hand again, this time not to be taken but to beckon him into the steam. Will stepped out of the last bit of his clothing, clumsily toeing off his socks, and followed him in. 

The shampoo that the property owner left for them was silky and mentholated, reviving them like smelling salts would for the fainted. Before he finished rinsing out the suds from Will’s hair, Hannibal pressed his lips on the space between his shoulder blades, then up his spine, then one final drag of his mouth on Will’s nape. The younger man turned around, brushing his bangs out of his own eyes, and pulled the other up against him. Their breath twirled together for the first time since the morning in that motel room. They met in the middle, the gracelessness of their already wide open mouths was made up for by their gloriously slippery skin. Their flush nude bodies drenched in bright smells and sweet exhaustion gave the illusion of early morning sex despite the sun setting outside. They ground together a few times and non-verbally made the decision to shut off the shower and take this to bed. Hair rinsing and soap lathering could wait.

Hannibal very pointedly closed the door to the bedroom so their nosy travel companion didn’t get another opportunity to stop them. Will laughed out loud at that and, unafraid to show his eagerness, pulled the man down into the now familiar place on top of him perpendicular to the bed. He held him firmly between his legs. The room was filled with the sounds of sighs and breath. Hannibal prepared him with the coconut oil they’d found by the hand soap on the bathroom counter and it felt like only a few minutes later that they were joined and moving in unison. The pace was leisurely enough to carry the tone of a long-awaited consummation but not so slow that they delayed the feeling they were both chasing. They hadn’t even spoken words aloud since the shower, just communicating in nods and sighs and the occasional smile. 

  
  


It was one final jagged nod before they both moved against one another in a faster rhythm. It felt so fluidly coordinated that Will was surprised to look down and see them both fully rippled by tensed muscles. They held their breath for a moment before rocking together in a few shaky last waves.

  
  


Beyond time but profoundly earthbound and, like blood and iron, it always seemed to rush back to Hannibal and the body. The uninvited orator of the lesson we all suppress: all we are is a hunger and a doing whatever we can to satisfy it. But, despite the jagged realities of desire, it is so frail just being alive. It’s all so papier mache.

With eyes closed and breath heavy, they pulled their fingertips along each other’s humid skin for dragging moments.

  
  


And on the note of frailty, Hannibal climbed out of bed and began to quickly and systematically strip everything from the bed.

  
  


Will grumbled through a frown, “you’re changing the sheets? What if I wasn’t done meditating on depraved thoughts?”

Hannibal looked down at him and grinned at his disoriented-ly tired voice. “I thought we might finish our shower and rest on truly clean linens.” He tapped his calf lightly to indicate for him to get up.

“These neuroses… a less glamorous branch of your self preservation?” Will didn’t move from his spot on the bed. 

“Perhaps more an effort toward aesthetic preservation, but yes, I also do not wish to sneeze.”

“Hard to picture you sneezing.”

Hannibal’s eyebrows raised as though they were flirting. “A testament to my successes in self preservation.”

Will hated himself for being charmed by the banter. He closed his eyes in a smile only to be jolted back to reality seconds later when he was fireman carried to the shower to finish washing the travel from them. He at least smacked this fireman’s ass.

  
  
  


\----***----

Jack stood at the makeshift podium of a multi-departmental briefing. About to embarrass himself.

“Consultant to the BAU Will Graham and Baltimore psychiatrist Dr. Lecter have been linked to the murder of three men. Will was someone who, during his time here, studied the Chesapeake Ripper’s work closely. Lecter is a former surgeon, so we've accessed that the together the two of them fit the profile. Considering the identity of the victims, it is still too early to say whether Graham and Lecter should be considered armed and dangerous to law enforcement or general public. The nature of the wounds show warm blooded attacks, complicated in intention by post mortem staging. The men have been identified as leads in the Virginia leg of the Marshall trafficking ring. That was the last case Will was working on before his… emergency resignation from the FBI.” He cleared his throat. “Price, you want to take over?”

“Yeah. So.” Jimmy pulled up his metal clipboard and ran his pen down the lines as he narrated them aloud. “Three victims identified as F. Priede, J. Priede, and M. Vilde. Vilde: COD was a BFT to the head. The Priede brothers were both GSW’s. One was a gut shot, piercing his left abdominal from the front at contact. COD ex-sanguination. The other was to the neck from several feet away, same gun, ex-sang from the carotid. The vics’ bodies were stacked on top of one another, wearing their death clothes but not in the location where the struggle occurred.”

Zeller stepped forward to speak. “Found in the national forest by a hiker.”

“Yes, I was getting to that…” Price looked impatiently over his shoulder, “– found in the national forest by a hiker, halfway between the highest altitude visitor’s lot and the foot trail. Level of decomp indicates approximately three weeks, with multiple events of freezing and thawing. And, as we discussed, post-mortem incisions directly overlaid on the circulatory system. Meaning unclear.”

Beverly looked down at her to-go cup and mostly spoke to herself, “wish we had Graham to explain it.” Her voice carried as though she was addressing the room and she feigned a guilty face at her sense of humor. “Sorry.”

“If anyone has been in touch with Graham or Lecter in the past month –”

Zeller chimed in again, “other than you.”

“– please share any information you have. Dismissed.”

Jack looked at the three of them with pure bite but said nothing and pulled out his phone.

  
  


\----***----

“Jack?”

“Hello, Dr. Bloom.”

“Feeling very formal, need my help on something?”

“Have you been in touch with Will or Dr. Lecter in the last few weeks?”

“Not much, why? Are they alright?” Sinking feeling.

“We… are trying to piece something together.”

“I haven’t spoken with Will in weeks, but I had Hannibal on the phone just a few days ago.” Sinking deeper.

“Is he still in the area?”

“How about you tell me what you know and I’ll tell you what I know, Jack.”

The man sighed. “We have evidence placing Will and Dr. Lecter at a triple homicide.”

Alana shook her head in disbelief and pressed her eyes shut. “And… you think they have something to do with it?”

“We all but _know_ it for certain, yes.”

It didn’t seem possible but she could hardly claim to have a grip on the men’s reality anymore to speak.

“Dr. Bloom, you just claimed you spoke to Lecter. What did you two talk about?”

She ran a hand through her hair. “God, Jack. He said he was in Washington. State. With Will, but I am not even sure that was true.”

“Tech is going to put a trace on their phones and we are going to get crews to their houses ASAP.”

She let out a condescending breathy chuckle at that and a little at herself. “They both moved.”

Jack’s voice came through the call in his usual fall back mixture of booming and disgruntled. “And they’re not even residing at the houses they’re selling?”

“I don’t even know. Sorry, I have to go.” She didn’t have to go, but she didn’t want to get involved or even really learn anymore. The FBI would dredge up filth on the two escaped men or the Bureau’s incompetencies would find some other way to shine through. _[If only Will could help.]_ She mentally chastised herself for the comedy.

_[Screw Occam. There will be an alternative to the obvious.]_

\----***----

_“that stoked a longing to realize an adventure his imagination swiftly and over and over enabled him to experience: the dream of drifting downward through strange waters, of plunging toward a green sea-dusk, sliding past the scaly, savage-eyed protectors of a ship’s hulk that loomed ahead, a Spanish galleon—a drowned cargo of diamonds and pearls, heaping caskets of gold. A car horn honked. At last–”_

Will, cracking an eye open, curved his position on their bed to get a better look at the man, which was enough to interrupt the reading. “Do you know me well enough yet to name those things your alleged love’s among? I mean besides choreographed savagery and deception, of course.”

Hannibal closed the book with a half smile at the remark. “I find I know you well enough but am limited by words. Just as I said there isn’t enough wire to take hold of you, there is hardly language or time to explain or predict you.” He laid a heavy hand on the place where Will’s ribs showed a little, as though guarding them. “Among autumn and ocean. Centuries and stories.”

“Funny that you would say I’m made of time and stories.” Will tugged the sheets up to feel less exposed. “I had a thought like that when we were in the river. In all my components, when placed together, there is a certain literature in me. Or some sort of collection of words bound by old glue.”

“But not a story.”

“No, not a story. Encyclopedia of sorts,” he smiled uncomfortably and mulled over the unfortunate trajectory for this conversation. He looked up at the ceiling as though it held a reality of a less directionless version of himself. “I look and see your name somewhere on every page.”

Hannibal quirked a brow at that. “Is your name there, too?”

“No, I’d have to be in pieces to be in my own work.” Will tilted his head further back and closed his eyes.

Contrasting his earlier brand of protective affection, Hannibal ran a thumb nail hard across the younger man’s lower gut. “The component parts you mentioned. You wouldn’t recognize them without the context of your being?”

“I hardly recognize the _whole_.” A sour chuckle. “Wish I had taken the time to bury who I was before.”

“Do not make the mistake of mourning him. He’s right here.” Hannibal rested his head on Will’s stomach. “A truth I am rather grateful for.”

Will ran a hand through Hannibal’s soft and ashy wisps. “I worry… I am idle without my overthinking and self-suppression. I worry I am idle without my grief.”


	9. Back for the girl?

Will woke the following morning in their luxurious bed, amazingly with the sheets still on his body. Though, he supposed, that was probably the work of his bedmate. Will wasn’t new to acting on his attraction to men, but thoughtful intimacies from them? _[Still weird.]_ The sun was at an unidentifiable height in the sky and there were no digital clocks to be found in the bedroom. Also no dogs or doctors. He made his way downstairs in the bizarrely quiet house hoping to stumble upon at least one of those two.

Sure enough, Hannibal was sitting on the bench in the yard near Winston, whose face was drenched in water.

_[No doubt a story there.]_

He broke through the semi-silence allowed by morning birds and rustling leaves. “You’re up.”

Hannibal peeked over his tablet with a warm smile. “Did you sleep well? I have been speaking with Thomas all morning. Your home is at the center of a bidding war, currently 20 above asking.”

Probably the biggest shock of the past few weeks. “Why… the hell would that be?”

“Fans of yours.”

Will squinted at him, before _[ah.]_ noticing Winston’s upside down water bowl. He looked back. “Fans?”

The warm smile turned into a distracted smirk. “It has gotten out that you are allegedly the Chesapeake Ripper.”

Will grimaced and moved to sit on the bench. “Show me the article.”

  
  


***

_Ripper Copycat in the Virginia Wild_

_Okay Tattlers, we have some intel from friends at the Federal Bureau of Repeated Embarrassments that there is another killer on the loose: a Chesapeake Ripper super-fan. And that killer is none other than our favorite deranged consultant Will Graham! It makes us wonder, dear readers, whether he’s a copycat or… he simply didn’t have time to clean up around his usual Ripper ‘masterpieces.’ Suddenly, his boonie house is a ghost town - Graham on the lam! I have a feeling this story is just unfolding. Tell us your thoughts below._

_***_

  
  


Will paused for a moment, short circuiting with all his possible reactions. “And Thomas knows about this and hasn’t said anything?”

The older man looked at him with an annoying amount of self-congratulation. “I will say this: Thomas has been the negotiator on a few of my properties over the years, only one of which is under the name Hannibal Lecter.”

“So he knows _I’m_ not the Ripper…”

Hannibal switched the order of his folded legs, drawing attention to his bare feet. “Not exactly what you’re implying. Per my relationship with him, your identity as the Ripper would only motivate him further.”

“Is he a fan of _your_ work?” Will hated that he was interested in these cryptic conversational baits Hannibal so enjoyed.

“I of his.”

Will frowned at the thought, even though he found it hilarious, his head conjuring images of Craigslist _missed connection_ posts. “Ah, a more binding power balance– what the hell is this?”

In the embedded Twitter feed at the corner of the page, one of the most recent tweets stood out:

_ >> Little Shrike out of the nest: Abigail Hobbs is out of the hospital and back in the world. Keep a close eye on your college bound teens - they have a new classmate! _

  
  


_[That lousy rabbit diet waste-of-bones.]_ He wished this was pre-digital age journalism and he could crumple this up and throw it in the trash. It linked to an article that he did not want to, but probably would, read.

  
  


Hannibal, indicating a change in tempo, closed the cover on his tablet. “Abigail will be forever pursued for what was done by her father. Whether by Jack Crawford or her peers.”

Will wiped his suddenly drenched palms on his shirt. “And her surrogate fathers aren’t very redeemable either.”

“A role you still assume?” Hannibal seemed genuinely curious, but he knew Will better than that.

“I always will. Or midwives to a bloody birth.” A mentally sketched future of homemade cheeses and a farmhouse in Grenoble was losing its appeal by the millisecond.

Hannibal stared at him for a long moment. Not so doused in affection this time. _Clinical_. “Let’s sleep on whatever you have already begun plotting. We should go to the market today.” He got to his feet and added, “we can take this one with us, seeing as he has already grown so restless.” Instead of indicating Winston, he looked over at his pair of sun drying house slippers. 

  
  
  


\----***----

There was an outdoor market closer to the city center, where they were able to stroll with Winston, under the cloak of bustling crowds and a language barrier. Winston was rather popular with the kids, though, which led to pauses in their conversations in case they walked into tourist town bilingualism. Pauses were brief, considering the dog clung behind Will’s legs like a shy toddler.

The men strolled down the center of this stretch of booths, not feeling inspired to browse scarves and jewelry. Seemingly out of nowhere, Will brought it up. “What would you have made with Oswald?”

Hannibal looked at him, then, but Will wasn’t looking back, too immersed in the hard work of not bumping into strangers. “Your uncle was your design. A beautiful one, at that.”

The younger man nodded. “Implication being that part of your design is your recipe?”

“And their imagined flavor profile considering their lifestyles.” The inevitable seal-breaking on this topic was coming through far more whimsically than either of them expected.

Will sneered. “So couldn’t have been anything with the liver or kidneys then.”

“He seemed like he’d have the proper tissue for haggis.” Hannibal paused the stroll. “Would you have eaten with me?”

Will could only really answer honestly. “I don’t know.”

“Aversion to haggis?” Hannibal looked far too pleased with his own response.

Will wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of a disapproving glare. “Do you only eat people you dislike?”

“Not exclusively.”

“Should I be concerned?” It was only fractionally comical. There would - perhaps forever - be a fort there, between a begrudgingly liberated man and the infamously indulgent other.

Hannibal offered him back a smirk before answering. “Probably.”

Will would maybe get used to the ambiguously sinister brand of flirting.

They were quiet for a long time. They were still only holding an unmarked bag of rice and a few vegetables when they finally came across a refrigerated booth of packaged meats, cheeses, and specialty hummus.

  
  


On the walk back, Will got his voice back. “Around crime scenes, I am in and out of feeling the hairs stand up on the back of my neck. It doesn’t feel like fear, though.” _[You used present tense. Now, what does that say?]_

The older man didn’t miss a beat. “A predator sensing the presence of another predator. Alerted but not alarmed.”

“No need for the sideways facing eyes of prey.” He smiled down at the other little carnivore, who’d stopped to chew on a mystery item in the grass.

Hannibal looked at Will. “You are saying you are not afraid of me.”

He shook his head in a non-committal way. “I am afraid of something, but I’m not sure what it is.” He smiled up at Hannibal, trying to gauge his reaction. “I’ll let you know when I find out.”

  
  


“Such a tease.”

  
  


\----***----

Still jet lagged, they were getting ready for bed before 8pm. 

Will tried a casual tone. (Knowing he’d never get away with that.) “How long is the rental for?”

Hannibal looked back at him in the mirror, speaking around his toothbrush. “I’ve been booking it weekly.”

Will brushed vigorously and paused again. “If we went back for her, what would you do if we were caught?”

“I thought we said you’d sleep on it.”

“I’m just… gathering information to sleep along with me.” He tried to sprinkle on a smile, maybe see if his charm was an accepted currency. 

“I would prevent negative outcomes in the way I see fit.” He spat and ran his brush under water. 

Will stared at the loud ambiguity, admissions from earlier lingering in his mind. He tried not to choke on toothpaste foam while he asked, stupidly, “what does that mean?”

Hannibal finished rinsing and left the room, answering over his shoulder, “it means exactly what it means.”

  
  


Will fell asleep hours before Hannibal was even tired enough to go back upstairs, and so, probably as a punishment for that, Winston was already keeping him company. Hannibal could have easily fit behind Will on the other side of the bed, but he wanted to make more (figurative) room for holds on former normalcy. He supposed Winston needed that, too. He could hold the man tomorrow. 

  
  


\----***----

Alana opened the door to his office, not even preparing her face for pleasantries.

As expected, Jack began as if they’d been talking for hours. “Tech got a satellite on their cells on a Chicago bound Amtrak, but law enforcement did a sweep in Missouri and the last stop and couldn’t find them. No cell tower traces.” He was shaking his head vigorously, hoping for some common sense truth to crawl out and explain it all. “So, Will and Dr. Lecter have left the area and possibly the _country_ , not answering any communications?”

She responded, patting the phone in her pocket. “We’ve only received a few uncoordinated lies and now radio silence.”

“We?”

Alana suppressed an affectionate smirk. “Mutual friend.”

A friend. Jack considered the idea that Will had a world away from this all. That’s all he’d been discovering lately. “And now they’re both selling their homes… and with the same realtor. So they were involved romantically?”

“More reasonable to assume that than believe they were living like Thelma and Louise.” _[Okay, wrong time and place… and audience… for humor.]_

He ignored it. It had been mostly rhetorical, anyway. “Why would they be copying Ripper signatures?”

Alana couldn’t help a flat expression at that. _[Desperately and perpetually tail-chasing heartless bodies in this place.]_ “... Surgical precision was just a circumstance given the people involved. It would raise more questions if it was sloppy.”

He ran a hand over his face. Sleepless lately. “Possibly.”

 _[What a jackass.]_ “If they murdered notorious sex traffickers during a fight, made hardly any effort to counter forensics, and now fled of guilt, it’s not exactly an act of evil.”

He leaned in, seeming as frustrated as a man who never cried could seem. “It is my job not to have this discussion the way I want to have it.”

She looked at her shoes. She owed him some folded arm solemnity, even if faked. “I understand. Goodbye, Jack.”

  
  


Alana walked off, pulling out her cell as more a reflex than anything else. Alana wondered how much she wanted to return to Quantico. It was slowly sterilizing around her; all of those fluorescents and yellowing linoleum, the projector in the darkness and the appropriately lifeless blue hues of the labs. It was draining from itself, from the corners of her vision. She wanted to sit in her little office and help people navigate the rest of their lives while they stared off at her ficus or tore nervously at their tissue. Or train 20-somethings to do the same. A coalition to pull our people out of the depths. Not teach _forensics_ , the exploration of the lost, with little hope for justice when everyone had some different perspective on the scales. And, still alongside it all, Freddie fucking Lounds was a thorn that pricked the skin and tore the shirts of everyone she cared about. Exploiting trauma like a rodent roots through garbage.

\----***----

_“gesturing up through the trees above to show them how it was woven across the sky or how the sky was woven into the trees, he wasn't sure which. But there it was, he smiled, and the weaving went on, green and blue, if you watched and saw the forest shift its humming loom. Dad stood comfortably saying this and that, the words easy in his mouth. He made it easier by laughing at his own declarations just so often. He liked to listen to the silence, he said–”_

_[There’s the nausea.]_ Seemed as though family was at the center of every story now. Abigail’s lips were always cracked these days. All she did was lick them for the temporary relief. _[One of those temporary fixes that shouldn’t even be considered a fix.] [None of it will ever go away that way.]_ At least she had beat up paper novels. _Dandelion Wine._ The smell of the laminated paper in her science textbooks, however, was all so unforgiving, brain-itchingly smooth. _[Disgusting. It’s all disgusting.]_ The way the lamination gathered up the Southern humidity like glass with condensation. Abigail was raised with a sensory repulsion to the synthetic. Or at least to things you can’t immediately trace back to nature. And now she wore a permanent agitation that activated all her rejections of her necessary realities. Dr. Lecter once told her that we all have a primal urge to keep living despite it all. He followed up saying, “though some do not have this urge.” He always sounded so coercive in his poetry. _[Tried to convince me he was my narrator. But my narrator is dead.]_

She missed Will Graham, oddly enough. The shivery bittered man who killed her father. The only person dirtied by her world who didn’t want to reject it. Who didn’t want to worship it, either. After saying goodbye to the dogs and meeting him as a man who was actually not crazy, who seemed… content in a way that was foreign to himself - she missed him like an old friend. And now she was in his old haunts, looking at shore birds he could probably identify, eating strange foods he could probably pronounce the names of, smelling the trees he admired. _[Why now? When did he become this to me?]_

She wondered if they would ever see each other again. She declined his gentle offer to take Zoe, saying she was facing too much instability, but then - within the month she found a stray. Well, she pulled his leash from a pole he’d been tied to in the rain. Okay, so she stole a dog. (A floppy-eared, clumsy paw-ed, black rottweiler hound mutt who, yes, she held like a baby.) Will would laugh if he found out. If he missed her beyond his compulsion to care for those spit out by the world. If he had given her something other than a jacket and a very dislike-able old people’s CD, she’d be inclined to believe he didn’t see her as a pitiful shadow of a daughter. _[He laughed at my jokes. Maybe that was a small medicine.]_

It wasn’t so much that she was rejecting this chance at school or her hostess job or the opportunity to be mentally chased by something so ordinary as loan debt. No, they were all rejecting her. She would never, never, never be for this world, never granted the bliss of anonymity in conformity that she craved with a wanderlust. Still, she had the urge to stay living despite it all. _[It’s sad to go to sleep and wake up. I do it anyway.]_ But steady she would hold. _[I have died a thousand times. Long live Abigail Hobbs.] [Maybe I’ll get a wig or something.]_

  
  


Her phone lit up.

“Good morning, Abigail, it’s Dr. Bloom. I just wanted to check in considering the latest, well, you know.”

“Yeah. I just have no options, right? Don’t worry, I hadn’t exactly gotten my hopes up.” _[Nothing’s come crashing down. Lately.]_

  
  
  



	10. Yes, back for the girl

Fur, dog breath, dark out, no Hannibal.

_[Oh my God, are we actually in a fight? God, what time is it and why aren’t there clocks in this goddamn room?]_

Instead of heading downstairs, he headed towards the light down the hall.

A study with a suede loveseat and a very concentrated doctor. _[Maybe the true crime nerd bidding war has reached the billions. Ha.]_

Hannibal looked up toward the noise in the doorway and smiled, holding an arm out on the empty half of the sofa. “Come here.”

Will smiled sheepishly, feeling guilty for his 20 seconds of bitterness, and joined him.

The doctor dragged him in closer to leech a bit of the warmth from bed and whispered into the top of his head, “one a.m.”

“Why are you still up?”

“A little bit of the answer starts with your going to sleep shortly after 8pm and another part is that I have been busy with some arrangements.”

Will exhaled loudly, wondering why he got out of bed at all. And if he’d make it back now that it was just. so. far. away. “What you’re saying is you’re on a hot streak on Tetris.”

Hannibal kissed the top of his head. “I am not playing Tetris.”

He closed his eyes and squeezed the man’s deltoid. _[Jesus.]_ “Can your vague web activities wait until the sun is up?” 

Hannibal began to shut down his device. “Did you have pleasant dreams?”

Will nearly coughed out a humorless laugh. “Hardly.”

They stared at each other.

The older man lost all affect. “You are still dwelling on Abigail.”

Will pressed into his eyes hard enough to irritate the skin. “Kinda racketing in my skull, probably chippin’ away at the bone in there.” Suddenly, he had enough energy to smoothly march back to the bedroom.

He was followed. They both had to circle around to the left side of the bed to slide in behind Winston like the grandparents in _Charlie and the Chocolate Factory_. 

The older man settled into bed pretty quickly, probably more tired than he appeared. “You see her in your shoes.”

“It’s not –” Will cracked his knuckles in the dark, “– it’s just that so much of what I am, or have turned out to be, can be traced back to Hobbs.” Another gritty laugh. “And the terrible thing is, I feel… compelled to be– _there_ , but I might actually be the worst thing for her.”

“Or perhaps the singular person who can understand her.” Hannibal turned Will to face Winston and then curved around him.

Will was feeling much more activated now, clenching his fists in front of him. “I’m projecting my attachment to my own pivotal moments onto her. She might want to forget, and I’d just be tattooing the memory into her day to day.”

Hannibal gave a patient sigh that he could feel curl around his neck. “You and I aren’t simple abstractions of bad deeds and traumatic moments destined to shape whatever young mind walks by.”

Will bodily chuckled in his arms. “Aren’t we?” Loudly implied: _[Isn’t that what you love to do?]_

“When it happens it isn’t out there as though you’re written down,” he placed his palm across Will’s sternum. “It is only this breath - is it exhaled is it inhaled is it held? Okay, what about the next one?”

Will was calming down now, despite the impromptu condescending philosophy lesson that he would likely never agree with. “We’re all marked with something.” _[I, by you.]_ “Abigail should have the chance to step out of this world and go home to herself.” _[Like I did, but in the wrong direction.]_

“Again, I will say: we are not just abstractions of bad,” Hannibal said, his patience audibly ebbing.

“You’re actually working to convince me to go find her or is this self defense?” Will patted the hand on his sternum, trying to toss back some of the condescension. 

The hand caught his fingers quickly. “I do not want you to spend so much time and skull integrity on flagellation when you have already made your choice. It’s wasteful.”

“So…”

Hannibal sniffed the crown of his head. “She is taking late term basic requirements at Tulane. I have already petitioned with my contact in Baltimore for a second synthetic identity, last name Gabriel. It is better to get started on those even if she’s uninterested.”

Will rolled over to look at him, but he could hardly see. “You’re kidding.”

Hannibal pressed his shoulder gently to turn him forward again and rumbled, “go to sleep.”

Will could feel his smile against his ear.

_[Okay, maybe this man won’t kill you.]_

\----***----

“Brace yourself because I’m about to ask you a very annoying question.”

“Yes, these are my natural breasts.” Sam deadpanned, sipping on her 7-11 coffee. The two of them decided to eat gross food and walk aimlessly around downtown. It was still obnoxiously cold out.

Alana snorted. (She’d felt herself doing that more lately.) “I actually was going to touch on the topic of what you want to do with your degree? Do you just like the fast paced lifestyle of molecular biologists?”

“Ooooh, _that_ question. It’s always one or the other,” Sam smiled in her direction. “Well, I am looking to get into research. I’m not really the right candidate for life as a physician or an academic or anything. I just wanna stare at bacteria in a dark office somewhere and report my findings to a kind boss. I don’t really have my sights set sky high, I know.”

“No, no. Actually. That sounds nice. I–” Alana wondered what part of her came off as someone who would say anything judgmental to that. _[All the more reason to get out.]_ “I was thinking recently about how I want to dial back my life into direct change as much as possible.” Now she was the sheepish one. It’s precarious to plan ahead. “My ideal involves a _sunlit_ office and hopefully less bacteria, but, yeah, same general trajectory. I need…” [out of here. to get a life. to deal with fewer hot headed men.] “a change.” 

They slowed to look at each other for a little.

Sam broke the silence. “Do you want to go to my place and have sex while we watch _Downton Abbey_?”

“Definitely, yes.” Alana felt her mind being read. “First, though, I really socially should tell you something that I really legally shouldn’t.” _[You made your choice right there.]_

Sam’s eyes bugged. “A juicy and also nerve-racking topic introduction… what is it?”

Alana winced. She’d rehearsed this disclosure in the car. “So. I guess it’s already out, _technically_ , courtesy of Freddie Lounds–”

“Ugh, from what I’ve gathered, it’s a surprise she isn’t missing teeth and covered in stitches.”

Alana wouldn’t bring up Abigail – truly less for ethical or ongoing investigation reasons and more for absolute visceral sympathy reasons. Instead, she offered a pained swallow. “That is exactly right. Well, the gist is that Will is the primary suspect in a crime.” _[He did it and everyone knows.]_

Sam’s steps faltered for a second. “The type of crime being investigated by the FBI?”

“A triple homicide.” Alana nodded through the loud thinking, then continued, “three sex traffickers from a huge ring. Identified them through the case he’d been working on for the last two months before he resigned.” _[I… understand it all.]_

“Sounds like they won’t be missed.” Sam took another sip from the overly sugared coffee. “Also sounds like I should’ve been more afraid of Will.”

“Or afraid _for_ him.”

Sam flinched at that. “I don’t know… he could hold his own. I guess, responsibly, I should ask: was it premeditated?”

“There was a struggle. Hannibal was there, too. They desecrated the corpses together.” Alana felt her head shaking. It all sounded so far away now.

“Wow, I mean, so– okay. That’s something.” She chuckled a little cynically. “It’s strange… despite his rugged edges, I gotta say even book burning and tax evasion seemed out of his depths.”

“He’s… multi-faceted.” Alana smiled down at the coffee she hated but Sam liked. “So this means both of them are wanted fugitives.”

Sam looked at her through the corner of her eye. “You had feelings for him?”

“Yes. Oh, God, it’s obvious?” She wanted to bang her head against a wall..

“No, no. I just get the warmth in you. I always fall a little in love with my friends, I guess. So I get it.”

Alana was experiencing a very therapeutic mix of partially unpleasant, partially crackling emotions. _[And catalog this moment for future choices.]_ “Yeah, that’s funny, I definitely do, too. It’s easy.”

The smile they shared was so bright it seemed in-congruent with the D.C. weather. All the more glittering for it.

Sam, feeling bolder in PDA these days, tugged on a wave in Alana’s hair. “Well, now I at least feel less guilty about what I’ve been thinking for the past two months.”

“And what is that?” Alana had a feeling this was headed into uncharted waters.

Sam tried to hide her grin behind the lip of her cup. “That I’m glad Will had encephalitis. Seemed to catalyze a lot of lovely things.”

Alana faked a shocked expression before choking out, “that is an awful thing to say.” A brighter smile, guilty at feeling the same way since finding out what led her into a colleague’s dog sitter.

“Forget I said it if he’s cleared.” She visibly mulled over his crimes and sucked her teeth. “Or just forget I said that.”

“Deal.” Alana linked arms with her and made a real effort not to appear as overwhelmed as she was feeling.

  
  


\----***----

_“She went back to eating earth. The first time she did it almost out of curiosity, sure that the bad taste would be the best cure for the temptation. And, in fact, she could not bear the earth in her mouth. But she persevered, overcome by the growing anxiety, and little by little she was getting back her ancestral appetite, the taste of primary minerals, the unbridled satisfaction of what was the original food. She would put handfuls of earth in her pockets, and ate them in small bits without being seen, with a confused feeling of pleasure and rage–”_

  
  


Hannibal closed Will’s book mid-sentence and pulled him up by the hand in the garden. 

Will frowned down, a little in disbelief. _[I will always be getting to know him.]_ “What the hell?”

The older man led him back into the house. “Come upstairs. If you’ve already begun reading Gabriel Garcia Marquéz, then I have left you to your solitude for far too long.”

Will got his smile back at that. _[This man is an alien who has been told he’s charming too many times.]_ “You came to retrieve me because you thought I was lonely?”

Hannibal pursed his lips, disappointed that he didn’t get a laugh. “Not at all, if I had that impulse, I would have come to collect you when we first met.” He paused on the stairs to give him a faux pity pout. “I wanted to show you something.”

“Is it something I’ve already _seen_?” Will asked, feeling unusually flirtatious. He was satisfied to see the side of a smirk when they turned the corner into the bedroom. “You… packed.”

“I thought we’d leave in the morning.”

“To…” 

“We must first take a train to Paris, then from there we will fly to Dulles.”

Will made an ‘ah, of course’ face. “Then to New Orleans.”

“After a few days, yes. Before anything, I have some matters to attend to with Thomas and with closing certain holdings.” Hannibal made eye contact to imply several things “It’s easier in person.” He cleared his throat. “And the last flight will be from New Orleans to Milan.”

“Winston can’t do that all over again…” It was stressful to be apart from him for even that single flight. He felt like he was a parent putting a newborn into the arms of a relative for the first time.

Hannibal smiled knowingly, getting a tiny double chin. “I’ve arranged for him to stay with a lovely woman. He will be settled and expecting us. Tail wagging.”

Will smiled at the image before frowning at his inability to keep up with this plan. “In Milan?”

“Grenoble. Milan is easier to fly into for trains to the Alps. I will still return to my professorial position. Should everything go smoothly in the States.” He didn’t look up, but his eyebrow twitched.

The last part slimed up the room.

Will didn’t even begin to have a blueprint for how to start the next part of the conversation. “Last night. You said you’d do what you had to. If we were to get into trouble.”

“Yes.”

“Does that include… consequences to me and Abigail?” He bit the inside of his cheek. _[You know the answer - you want to see if you’re beyond lying.]_

Hannibal regarded him carefully before answering, “I do not know.”

It still was disappointing to hear confirmed. “So it’s self preservation, not group preservation. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not terribly surprised, I just want to know if I –”

“-matter to me?” The other man again was looking down at the shaving bag he’d been fiddling with.

“-shouldn’t trust you.” They had a bit of a stand-off then. He could _trust_ that Hannibal would continue to be Hannibal. He could trust him to obscure and he could trust him to know the gallon prices on bleach. 

Hannibal stood taller and turned his head to survey him even more thoroughly than before. Looking for something different on him this time. “What could I do? Are you at all conquerable? The day I come after you, Will, is the day I have nothing else left.”

Will turned the word choice over in his head. _[To a glut, that could mean anything.]_ “If you had nothing else, why would you take the last thing from yourself?”

“You can not belong to me.” Hannibal at least had the decency to smile at the statement and tack on, “in the very literal sense.”

Will smiled back a little, getting more comfortable with objectification considering the other interests of the objectifier. “Sounding a bit like Lennie. Crush me in your hands because you like me so much.”

Matching clenched jaws.

“Are you still trying to type up a pathology on the Ripper?” Hannibal threw it back tauntingly. “Find out if a killer knows how to love in all the ‘right’ ways? Of the two of us, only one of us has been emotionally forthcoming.” It was a challenge.

“Can you? Love in the right ways?” Will suddenly became hyper-aware of the packed up room, of the ordered documents, of the lodgings for Winston, of the property sales and alias holdings. Everything. _[Bribery, compensation, manipulation? Without a doubt.] [But that mouse probably loved Lennie up until the last bit.]_

Hannibal literally tsk’d at the question. “Again you latch onto the word ‘right’, Will, as though it were the center of anything. Asking _me_ so you don’t have to ask yourself?” His nostrils flared in self-satisfaction, knowing well by now that the other man found turnabouts to be a small cruelty. “I break the fundamental rules of many every time I kiss you. So, ‘morality’ comes down to what original we’ve decided to imitate. We are just copies.”

It was effective as much as it was declarative. Will anxiously ran a hand through his curls. It felt luscious - he felt for a second infatuated with himself and who he was here. “I still wonder. If I’m a copy of _you_ specifically. If we are cast and mold. Have I latched onto what you are?” _[Did you turn me into the molten material or did I?]_

And that was something equally declarative, at least to Hannibal. He gained an intensity. “You academics would claim I am a person like Will Graham specifically can not mirror. It is your other gift that brings us together.”

Will rationally knew that part. Or academically knew that part. Didn’t mean he wasn’t marked up by this man. Still, he also knew, “what’s left is what isn’t copied.” Sounded true aloud. “To not serve as someone else’s reflection.”

“Does it feel good? Not to empathize? To look into opaque waters and only see yourself gaze back?” Hannibal’s eyes were capable of warmth, mirth, lust. But, yes, he was capable of such opacity. Because he – himself – was the morningstar.

The younger man, helpless under affectionate scrutiny, looked down at no particular point on the floor. “Quite the pair.”

“Some might call a community of this size a ‘family’.” Hannibal said it with a quirked smile, knowing the word would land hard.

Will wasn’t sure if he liked that. Seemed like the wrong cut for his frame. “Some might.”

They moved magnetically to each other. 

_[Monsters embrace each other, apparently. Monsters are okay with being doused in another’s scent, apparently.]_

When Hannibal leaned down to bring their mouths together, it was not out of sexual drive but out of ‘it hurts that we are not a single thing.’

_[Eating earth. The taste of primary minerals. The original food.]_

  
  
  


\----***----

Alex was kind of an asshole. She was a true crime geek so, of course, she’d heard of Abigail. She called her Zodiac Hobbs.

Knowing Abigail’s history always comes with the expressed relief that her father is dead. It’s always made to seem so simple: _oh, the monster is dead, the girl-eater is dead._ It also comes with speculations about Abigail, her own capacity for evils, a sensationalized teasing with an undercurrent of fear. Strangely, under her father’s wing, she was pulled around within a very clear enclosure but now, her wraths were her own, inhibitions fading. Worse, she knew _how_ . And she wanted to. _[Bad.]_

Societal taboos and laws matter a hell of a lot less when you’re not welcome to participate in that society. _[When exiled from Rome… don’t give a fuck what the Romans do.]_ It wasn’t trauma alone that brought her to this wrath and it wasn’t rejection alone that kept her far away. Abigail Hobbs knew quite well that she was shaped for social performance and to find herself only in parallel lives. And that shape shattered on a kitchen floor. A memory so stretched and retold it’s lost all time but not its ever-presence. _[New surroundings as some soap to wash the history from my skin? Not possible. A line of knotted pink scar tissue on my neck. You don’t need tabloid notoriety to wear these horrors. Loud advertisement to a story the same way a body glows when it's pregnant.]_

But she had Elijah. (His mess of ears and paws and sleepy gratefulness.) She always liked that about Will’s dogs. No ‘Socks’ or ‘Chunk’, just strays now with names so human that it made you wonder if they all sat down at the dinner table together the second you left the place. Elijah got tired easily, didn’t ask for much. Cute enough for Abigail’s roommates to not kick up a fuss. But that image of a family of dogs out in the middle of nowhere by the fire was exactly the calm melancholy that she craved. Needed. For now she had Elijah.

One day last week she held him in her arms (he can barely walk through the puddles from Louisiana spring) and they stumbled upon a street musician. Not hard to come by in these parts, but this was a beautiful woman playing deep and rapid notes on an odd looking cello. Every instrument seemed to sound different in New Orleans. Like it had a loud animal inside of it. Abigail probably overstayed her welcome as the sole audience member to this woman in the rain. But it was one of those sticky moments that you never get out of your head. Maybe the cellist knew she was generating little seconds of pure unnamed religion there. Water thuds, chest humming tones, grieving artist playing old warped wood in the rain, emerald evening gown soaked through. _[See, a girl can be haunted by more than shrieks.]_

That moment was yet another “you don’t belong here” voice, but said this time as a kindness. She said it to Elijah, who can’t handle the swamp. She said it to herself, who can’t handle her wrath. It was funny, that idea. After all those years by the upper course of the Mississippi, now she was at the mouth of it, getting spit out. 

She could go. Get out before her student loans became a beast. Or she could stay. Change Alex into venison. She could go. Hide behind language barriers and dull employment. Anonymity didn’t mean lonely. It certainly couldn’t be lonelier than this.

\----***----

  
  


It turned out that Thomas served as the middleman for purchase and sales on Hannibal’s two properties (three counting _Will the Ripper’s_ ) in the area as well as a few abroad. All with last names (and associated accounts) of varying ethnic heritages. Even though they dealt mostly in cash, Will was surprised to find out how little actual liquid wealth Hannibal had. And how many sub-letters he communicated with. He wasn’t sure he’d ever spoken this much about property investment and market appreciation before in his life.

The sales closed surprisingly–and–unsurprisingly fast. In fact, the fund transfer to make Will Graham’s revenue into “Rene Gabriel’s” revenue would be the longest step of the entire process so as to not raise suspicion. They spent the day on Hannibal’s cliff side home, passive aggressively exchanging novels and indulgently dozing off in the fresh linens.

Hannibal cooking again was a palpable exhale for the both of them. All that he put together was toast and eggs, but it clearly brought him instant gratification in a way someone looks when they just got back from their dealer’s house. He brought the dishes to the counter top where Will was flipping through a document binder full of laminated pouches, and carefully slid it out of the way to get Will’s full attention.

“So. Bogotá.” Will broke the yolk over the toast. “Why not go there?” He wasn’t sure why Colombia was sounding so appealing at the moment. Probably through comfort and intellect, considering he already knew how to navigate Spanish pretty well. It seemed like a necessary skill at one point. He also knew way too much about Neo Tropical castniidae after his most recent publication. Which… seemed necessary at that time, too.

“Well, I can not teach there but I would like to take you some day. The property doesn’t have much land itself, but it’s joined with cow fields. Rather stunning – You’re smiling.”

He was. _[Ha.]_ “You aren’t fluent in Spanish?”

Hannibal frowned at him skeptically. “That pleases you.”

Will shrugged. “I like us on equal footing for certain things.”

Hannibal smirked at Will’s concept of him. “We’ve always been on equal footing.”

“Oh, I beg to differ.” Will rolled his eyes, though his mind did dutifully provide flashes of the other watching him kill four men this year. _[Huh. Maybe I am that ‘fearsome thing to behold.’]_

Hannibal paused, debating on whether or not to make eye contact. “Your existence in the world is an upper hand. Forgive me if I clamber to control you.” He took a bite.

Will had an immediate urge to deflect the attention, but something braver took over: he made a conscious effort to believe it. Not that a position of leverage put him out of danger, of course, but it was nice to be praised for his rarity now for a reason other than his pathology.

Amazing that he thought for so long that bodies-touching-bodies was the ultimate intimacy. Will questioned his concepts of consummation, of why every “the first time we ever ___” was not applicable to every beautiful thing that had ever happened. _[The first time I laughed at your joke. The first time I knew exactly what you were about to say. The first time you said one of my dog’s names.]_ He wanted to change him in some way. The only end goal being a mark. _[‘I want to do to you what spring does to the cherry trees.’]_

Now aware that he had some sort of precarious equal footing, he wondered if this man – who Will just months ago referred to as “stony and hedonistic” – was actually subtly begging for reassurances despite all of his performed confidence. He was.

Will, in a moment of gentleness that took more bravery that he would have thought, lifted a hand to touch the doctor’s shoulder. The man in question was already a few bites further into his breakfast since Will began his reflective trance and he was content to let him stay in it.

Hannibal looked over at the motion, to where Will now moved his hand to trace his ear and neck. Will went for a smile, but it probably came out with more gravity than the moment called for (on paper).

The older man made a face so bewildered at the honest initiation of non-sexual affection that Will laughed out loud at himself. At the dynamic he has always inevitably created by being closed off and stubborn. _[Go for it, Graham.]_ “I’m looking forward to it all.” He frowned at himself, remembering their first breakfast. Their sparring, their reacting elements. “I like your company. Always have.” He gave his deltoid a hard squeeze (he also just liked touching his delts) and ran the hand up into his hair, offering an appraising smile.

Hannibal stared at him, still astonished by his own constantly evolving picture of the man.

Will turned back to his plate and added, “eat your breakfast.” Hannibal obeyed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i will literally paint you a picture if you can guess one of my two favorite lines lol okay 
> 
> so i went all in on the references this chapter and I'll be specific - "the morningstar" is another name for Angel Lucifer; the cherry tree quote that reappears is by Pablo Neruda; the book excerpt is from 100 Years of Solitude; and "Lennie" is from Of Mice and Men


	11. France, Again

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Forgive the delay, I added a chapter to an old fic! Okay, here is a fun weave of plots lol  
> There will prolly be just one or two more chapters of this story (happy ending)  
> i didn't proofread - it's life in the fast lane

Hannibal and Will found a sweet simple made-to-order sandwich shop that boasted fresh and local. Good enough.

As they moved to go around the line forming rope, a man walked in the door and passed around the rope to go straight to the register. The cashier looked apologetic for a brief moment before the man interrupted her greeting to place his “usual.” It was a level of tension that seemed out of place for the neighborhood. When Will looked over at Hannibal, he was already gazing back with a knowing gleam. Everywhere has rude people. _[You don't know if you like who you are when you’re with him. But you know who you are when you're with him. And you like that.]_

Will eyed up Hannibal a little longer. They’d found a t-shirt that hugged his arms and hinted at the rest of his proportions. It was black, because a man like him was too dignified for the casual Louisiana pit stain. (Will, however, was not too dignified.)

Hannibal raised his eyebrows, looking hopeful that Will’s staring was actually related to what he was staring at in this instance.

Will grinned. “You look nice.”

“I’m not a piece of meat, Will,” Hannibal whispered into his ear. He looked pleased at the praise.

“I think some people sticking to your diet would strongly debate that.” _[Alright, you like who you are when you’re with him.]_ Will gestured noncommittally. “I wear this stuff all the time, but it’s not the same as you wearing it.”

Hannibal patted his pockets to remind himself where he had relocated his wallet in the new pants, and spoke softly to himself, “trout, salmon, compliments.”

Will twisted his eyebrows at that, thinking for a second that it was a quirky menu item title. “Excuse me?”

“Oh, I’m compiling a list of things you fish for.” His self-satisfaction was obvious despite turning his eyes to the menu board.

 _[Can I tell a murderer he has bad taste in comedy? Can I tell a cannibal he has bad taste?]_ “I’m walking away from this conversation.” Will headed toward the prepackaged sandwich fridge.

Hannibal called louder, “facing away from me is not a way to avoid compliments.”

He felt like a blushing bride at the remark. “Oh, Jesus Christ.”

They were only second in line at the café, so the flirtation received a laughing smile from the cashier, which made Will even more uncomfortable. He scanned the room to see if any other people were listening in. _[Of course they were. Of course half the line was listening to attractive middle aged men flirt with each other.] [At least we’re in the city.]_

  
  
  


Will lifted his prepackaged lunch while they waited for Hannibal’s. “Turkey sub. Whad’dyou get?”

“Persimmon beef kale salad. With fig vinaigrette or fig pieces, I believe. I didn’t read so closely.” Hannibal steepled his fingers on the sticky table while they waited.

The younger man at least had the manners to not start eating without him. “They really poured Louisiana through a Whole Foods filter, sounds like.”

“While on any other day I would love to dine with you at ‘Crawdad Roger’s’ across the street,” he flicked his eyes up mischievously, “I’m being mindful of the travel tonight.”

Will snorted. Unfortunately, Hannibal’s humor was slowly shaping to fit his own. That’s what humor does because that’s what people do. _[Oh no.]_

He cleared his throat to shift out of his affectionate spiraling. “So, we can’t surprise her at her place cause, even though places here are dirt cheap, she’ll have roommates. Knowing Abigail, there’s a chance the permanent address she listed with Alana was fake, anyway. I’d say we sit in the quad near the science and English buildings. At least one of those will be on her schedule if she’s taking late start requisites.” 

“Wouldn’t it be easier to call her?” He pulled out a small burner phone, clearly from the place they bought their clothes, and tried a charming smile.

“Okay, I recognize you love the drama of surprise, but can you please include me in your little tricks and plans? Probably hilarious to some wallflower in our dynamic that the most ever-present physical threat you pose to me are the symptoms of built up stress.”

Hannibal barely reacted, but began punching in the phone number from a post-it note in his wallet.

Will sighed, trying to grasp onto the progression again. “She’s not going to pick up an unknown number.”

“Ah, probably wise. I shall text..”

Will listened to the clicking sounds of the fat plastic buttons on the phone.

[SMS: 12:01pm] Hello Abigail, please give this number a call when you get the chance.

The phone vibrated within the minute. With his odd fastidiousness (social neurosis), Hannibal neutralized his face before answering, as though she could see him.

“Hello Abigail.”

There was a near gasp on her end. Hard voice to forget. “Hi? Dr. Lecter?”

“Yes, it is. We are in the area, would you like to meet somewhere today?” He closed his eyes. Will wondered if Hannibal always did this while on important phone calls or if it was reserved especially for conjuring sentimental images to accompany the voices.

There was a confused pause on her end. “Yeah, uh, you mean like for coffee?”

“Lovely. I should tell you that this is not purely a check-in, but meeting for coffee sounds lovely. Are you by your school?”

“Sorta. Can you give me 45 minutes and then we can meet at Dale’s on campus?”

Hannibal opened his eyes again to blink at Will in confirmation. “That works perfectly. See you in 45 minutes. Goodbye.”

He pocketed the phone into his blue jeans. With his skin and muscles in this outfit, he looked like the mysterious ranch hand in a romance novel. And everyone noticed.

_“Persimmon kale for Isaac!”_

Hannibal glided over to the pick-up counter and offered a soft “thank you, dear,” while slipping a neatly folded $20 into the tip jar. He pivoted on his foot and picked up a fork at the condiment station, glanced at Will before picking out a mustard packet for his sandwich, and then joined him at the table again. “Something amusing?”

“You just–” _[why am I smiling?]_ “no, nothing is amusing.”

Hannibal cracked open the cardboard on his meal and nodded toward Will’s plastic-wrapped lunch as if to say, _‘we dine together. Even if the meal came held closed by rubber bands.’_

 _[Okay. He’s charming. Just eat your fucking turkey sandwich, Graham.]_ He nodded a few too many times and tore at his wrapper.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  


45 minutes later, there she was. 

Will’s eyes lit up at the sight. Abigail wore a braid that strategically folded into intentionally messy unbraided hair on her left side. Classy move. Hard to get away with a scarf in this area. She had a little black and brown mutt on a leash at her feet, which made for a good excuse to only really offer one armed hugs to them.

Hannibal was the first to coo. “And who is this little gentleman?” He dangled his fingers like worms, though the dog was way too small to be intrigued.

Abigail scooped him up. “Elijah. He likes to be held like a baby.”

“How’d you find him?” Will eyed her suspiciously. “Because I know you don’t drive on backroads much,” he accused softly.

She bit the inside of her cheek but she didn’t look guilty. “Well, it rains a lot here. I… stumbled upon him.” 

Will laughed knowingly. “I have done the same.”

“He’s always tuckered out,” Abigail jostled him a little. He did look pretty sluggish. 

“Probably from carrying out these gigantic paws.” Will pinched his paws and wiggled them. “Are they heavy, buddy? Huh? Yeah I think they are.” 

Elijah licked out at the air with the attention.

Will looked up at Abigail, who was glowing with protective affection for the puppy. He peeled him slowly from her arms and gestured toward the coffee shop. “Alright, go inside and get something to drink and then we can keep walking.”

  
  
  
  


As soon as they picked a direction for the walk, Abigail began for them, “so…”

Will sucked up his second guessing. “Right. So. We wanted to first ask you how you are because that is relevant.”

She immediately appeared uneasy. “I’d say ‘I’ve been better’, but it’s been a while since that was the case.”

“Not liking school?” It was half a joke, really.

Abigail didn’t look at him before responding. “Feeling a little like… I don’t have the words.”

He peeked at her through the corner of his eye. “Feeling not meant for anything here? Like you’d… never arrive home no matter the door you walked through.”

She nodded softly and kicked a loose sidewalk chunk. “When you left, where did you go?”

“Here, actually, then we went to France. We just closed with our buyers up north, so we’re free to go.” Will cleared his throat in a small laugh. “Well, not _legally_ free to. But logistically free.”

“Yeah, I’m not legally allowed to leave the country.” Abigail sounded resigned. “Sometimes some lady calls me from the FBI. She keeps saying she’s ‘verifying statements and details’, so I think they’re all trying to intimidate me or something.”

Will hummed at that. _[Sounds about right.]_ “And if you wanted to go?”

Abigail wrapped her braid like a rope around her fingers. “I would have been across the world by now if I had a way. Or hidden on a mountain if I didn’t need a job.”

They slowed a little to a crawl and Will got up the courage to toss the offer out there. “We would like you to come to France with us. Would _you_ , uh, want to do that?”

They all stopped walking. “I would, just…” Her face coiled into a ‘what does that entail?’ grimace. And next, heartbreakingly, into ‘will I be okay?’.

Will nodded in answer. “Full disclosure: it will be boring but –”

Abigail chuckled at the idea that a chance at normalcy would ever be a deterrent. “But not here. Yeah, I’d like that. I’d want that.”

“Are you still in your add/drop period?”

“Yeah. I wouldn’t get some fees refunded though.” A defeated voice (that was slowly inflating).

 _[Ah, she’s already looked into leaving.]_ “So, call your job and anyone who would file a missing person’s report if you didn’t say goodbye.” _[They’ll certainly excuse a sudden life change tale from a hunted girl.]_

“When is this happening?” She was trying to clip the wavering in her voice to not sound desperate. 

Hannibal finally spoke up from behind his coffee cup. He clearly hadn’t considered how good the coffee would be in the area. “Tonight, if we can manage it.”

Her eyes bugged at that and she frowned down at Elijah.

“He’s fine.” Will crossed his arms over his chest. _[Step one complete.]_ “Are your roommates at home?”

  
  
  
  
  


The place was surprisingly kind of nice despite the building’s age. They scooted through the furniture clutter and set their bags down.

Will slapped his hips. “I’ll help you get your things together, and Hannibal can take this one.” He walked over to where Elijah was being cradled.

The man in question raised an accusatory eyebrow. “I can?”

“Yes. And since we have a willing escapee and surprise living cargo passenger, can you get started on the flight?” _[This is happening.]_

When Will pulled the dog from Abigail’s hold, he wriggled like he was trying to swim. Hannibal pursed his lips but tucked him against his chest and made his way over to the sofa.

The other two stared at the sight for a moment and then made their way to her room.

  
  


While Abigail buzzed around the space, she assembled small piles of toiletries, a few books, and clothes. There wasn’t much. A grim reminder of how little time she’s had to create a life for herself thus far. Nothing accumulated over months. Nothing irreplaceable. Just the utility of foundation.

“Isaac Abreo, René and Rose Gabriel.”

She looked up from what she was folding. “Rose?”

“I picked it. _He_ wanted to give you an old Cajun name like Celeste or Fleur. So, you’re welcome.”

She made an _‘ew’_ face. “Thanks. So you’re René?”

“It is a man’s name, yeah.” Will shrugged and zipped up the suitcase. “I don’t hate it.”

“I meant to say, you’re my dad?” Abigail stared straight at him with bright doe eyes. 

“Oh.” _[How do I forget about these elephants in the room?]_ “Yes. It’s just easier to explain.”

She pulled out the drawers again to check if they were empty. Without looking up, she added, “and how will you be explaining the European man and American man, y’know, co-habitating?”

He gave her a ‘ha’ sarcastic look.

Naturally, she pressed on with the grilling. “What will I do there?”

Will relaxed at the subject shift. “Oh, no mistake: you’re going to attend the university there and be very bored.” He tried to avoid her eyes as best he could, which is a difficult task with such a determined girl. “No one will know you,” he mumbled.

“Sounds good. Like just what I need.” She stood up straight and exhaled sharply, starting to recite silent circumstance acceptance.

When Abigail picked up the stack of books at the edge of the stripped bed, she pulled the one off the top. “I’ve been reading this book, um, _Dandelion Wine_.”

He lit up a little. “Oh, Bradbury? I’ve read it, but a long long time ago.” _[When I was your age.]_

“Well uh, there’s this bit that I just read yesterday – can I read it to you?”

Will nodded, trying not to look over-eager.

She flipped back a few pages from where her finger held and began, “the real heart pounding his chest. The million pores on his body opened. ‘I'm really alive! he thought. I never knew it before, or if I did I don't remember…’” She trailed off. “That’s how I’ve been feeling since - meeting you. But in a quieter way. Sorry, I feel awkward for reading out loud now.” Mentally chastised herself.

He shook his head. It was so familiar. It was how he was feeling, too. _[A.H. - After Hobbs. Or. A.H. - After Hannibal. More accurate, probably.]_

Abigail tossed the book into her heavy-looking duffel. “Why are you smiling so goofy? You look like a different person.” 

He made a fake hurt gasp. “First off, _ow_. But, it’s funny that you read to me. I’m just realizing that we’re probably more similar than I imagined.” Will pointed a thumb in the direction of the living room. “We’ve been killing time lately by reading to each other. Just picking random spots in books.” When he spoke, he could tell that share was overly intimate. He winced.

She squinted skeptically for a long moment and then made a big theatrical nod.

Will smiled back uncomfortably. “Yeah.” _[Well, that’s that, then.]_

  
  
  


Abigail had barely unpacked – or had already been packing up to leave – so they finished the operation pretty quickly. The pair returned to the living room area, where Hannibal was sitting cradling a puppy (who was stretching up to lick his neck) in his one arm, and tapping away at his tablet with the other. The glasses were slipping from his nose and he had a better grip on Elijah than he did on his device. Will wished he was more complicated than finding this the most beautiful sight of all of their travels… but it really was breathtaking.

  
  


\----***----

  
  


_The Boys are Back in Town_

_I have reports that Will Graham and Dr. Hannibal Lecter officially sold their properties this week with_ _wet_ _signatures! Keep your eyes peeled, readers. Just a day ago, the body of one Mr. Oswald Graham (confirmed to be our profiler’s paternal uncle) was found floating through New Orleans, cut and scarred with a rather determined hand. Uh oh, what did uncle Oswald do, Will?_

_What do we think? Are we getting a glimpse into the tragic backstory of a psychopath?_

_Report Murder Husband sightings to the number below!_

  
*  
  
  
  


Sam wanted to punch a hole in her work desktop like it was the drywall in a frat house. She whispered to herself at her desk, “I’m gonna kill her.” She whipped out her phone. No chance Alana escaped this garbage considering her circle.

_[10:09AM] I’m gonna kill her_

**[10:11AM] Ha. That might lead to more negative press, actually**

_[10:12AM] Catharsis is a crime now? Lol_

**[10:15AM] I’d love to point you in the direction of alternative treatments. but I’m blind with rage :)**

Sam picked up her phone and set it down. Then picked it up again and drifted off with a strange plan.

_[10:17AM] I think I’m gonna stop by his place and get some closure. Weird or not weird?_

**[10:21AM] Not weird. Obviously Freddie is grasping at straws, but her little web sleuth family magically deciding he’s a serial killer is digging a hole for him.**

**[10:21AM] Regardless, closure on Will Graham sooner rather than later will be a healthy choice**

She stared so hard at the words that she slipped out of reality for a moment. If such a thing existed at any point in the last few weeks.

_[10:25AM] I’ll let you know if a bunch of ghosts fly out of his barn_

**[10:26AM] I definitely think that is an anecdote you would pass along, yeah**

  
  
  
  
  


By noon, Sam was peeking through his front window. There was a car in the driveway, but the “sold” sign was still out front – so answers to questions didn’t feel on the menu today. The owners wouldn’t have moved in yet, so possibly a surveyor or a local real estate lookie-loo. Or a fan.

A strangely calm voice called out to her from the side of the house. “Are you the new owner?”

Sam was expecting to run into the car’s driver eventually, but the voice still startled her. _[Obviously I’m not the owner, why would I be staring through the damn window?]_ “No. Who are you?”

The woman slowly stepped toward her, frowning down at her shoes sticking in the mud. “A friend of the previous owner’s.” She said it with an ‘I dare you to challenge me on that’ expression.

It was unimpressive and unconvincing. “If you were actually his friend, you would know all the reasons I have trouble believing you.” Sam looked down and saw an expensive lens extension on the stranger’s phone. “Alright big red, what’s your name?”

The stranger’s eyebrow curled. “Yours first, stretch.” She raised her camera to take a picture of Sam. A healthy insurance policy in her business, no doubt.

Sam didn’t flinch at the scratching sound of the photo capture. “So, you didn’t just come here to snoop in Will’s barn for trauma to exploit, Freddie?”

Freddie still approached slowly, but didn’t miss a beat. “Will Graham has more than just _figurative_ skeletons in his closet. You might want to find a hiding spot on my side of the line before this all goes to trial.”

Sam didn’t know what took over her muscles – some long quiet phantom of Boston anger or some steroid shot of warm cheeked denial – but she landed a hard swing. Catharsis, as it turned out, was not the same as closure, but it felt mighty good in the lungs.

Freddie stumbled against the siding of the house, looking horrified and cupping her jaw. To her credit, she lifted the tricked out phone again to begin filming.

That was enough reason for Sam to bolt. _[This will turn into “something” soon, but Will can’t be the only one messing with bad people.]_ Lots of things would be big somethings soon. _[God, sorry, Will. I know it’s not the same.]_ _[Bitch if you actually wanted closure you could stop fucking praying to Will Graham like he’s the patron saint of vengeful violence.]_

Knowing a killer, though… knowing a killer feels like meeting the ancestor of an act. She wondered if he truly feared the law anymore. Maybe a 5’10” professor who takes in stray dogs and sets a timer for his pills actually would loosen all his threads that wove him under government decisions once he saw, up close, their inaction. If he ever turned his fascination with criminal psychology into fascination with their capture and treatment. Sam very intentionally never read the infamous _‘Takes One to Know One’_ article, but she could assemble the gist from all of the circling implications about his talents and behavior. It was lazy social commentary to take a hyper-perceptive man – under the stress of perceiving the world that shouldn’t exist to be perceived – and paint him as the thing that he crushed himself and his reputation to stop. It was lazy analysis but, like everything, still held the confounds of all subjects who work in major institutions: why are you here and, more specifically, not _not_ here? _[Hey Graham: why are you not here right now?]_

\----***----

Jack through paper-clipped printouts onto a small table in the lab. “Will Graham’s uncle was found bloated and scarred in a bank just outside of New Orleans.”

Beverly’s brow went up. She knew a reach when she heard one with all these rooms around here - so full of men delusionally okay with themselves. “No Ripper mimicry markers?”

Jack palmed the top of his head. He looked exhausted with himself. “None. Just, well, hatred.”

That got her attention. “You’re saying overkill?”

“No, however– there’s an accompanying narrative there.” He picked up the stack again to stare at the same information he’d been staring at all morning. “My understanding is the guy was not well-liked.”

It was almost infuriatingly tunnel visioned detective work. “So... it could have nothing to do with Will.”

Jack gave her a disapproving stare. “It’s his uncle.”

She shook her head. “Yeah well, he’s never mentioned him before to anyone, so I doubt he was really keeping him up at night.”

Beverly leaned in and whispered, “let it go, Jack. You didn’t drive him insane. He’s not waltzing around the country fetishizing an infamous serial killer.”

Jack just nodded. He was glad no one else was around to witness him on the receiving end of a pep talk.

She pulled back, retracting the hand that she’d placed on the table in his direction, and folded her arms. “Plus, I think we’re all capable of killing sex traffickers and fucking hot psychiatrists.” It was an attempt at humor but she clipped her laugh. He needed to consider that it’s truly not ridiculous. So biased in the direction of propriety and the law that he forgot urge and soul.

Jack covered his face with his hand for a moment. So very tired. He was sure that Will would have gotten off easy with those kills, despite getting in over his head with only the help of his doctor friend. Ill-advised behavior plus two months of fruitless investigation would of course become what it became. But if he’d broken the seal on his comfort in taking lives, this would only escalate. It wasn’t absurd to connect the cases. Any Ripper parallels were a stretch, yes, but Will’s development of an M.O. couldn’t be free of influence given his... mind. 

  
  


\----***----

There was a sort of clammy silence before the two women got their orders. 

“So.” Sam began, taking a nervous second to suck her teeth. “I wanted to bring something up. Maybe sprinkle it in early on for future consideration.”

Alana looked concerned - she all but flinched with the set up. “Okay…”

“I have a new job.” The woman rotated the saucer with her coffee. Some spilled. “It starts off just with just a few appearances here and there for the next few months, but essentially _promises_ recruitment for a full time position once I’ve completed school.”

When Alana silently waited for more information, Sam went on, “so that would be about five months from now. And it’s in Charlotte.”

There was a pause. Not quite sad, but socially unnerving. Alana inhaled and went for it with a smile. “I don’t want to be presumptuous– you’re sprinkling this in now for…”

So uncomfortable. Sam wished she rehearsed. “For you to keep in mind. In case you wanted to cut things off with me ‘cause… it’ll only get harder, or in case, I don’t know, that ‘big life change’ you’ve been hoping for could start with a relocation to a red state.” A nervous laugh. “Or in case you want to forget this conversation but appreciate an excuse to go on vacation to Charlotte next month, the weekend of the 17th.”

It was such a confusing offer, but Alana didn’t have to weigh it very long. “Well, I’m not going to cut things off.” _[Because to know Sam is to love Sam.]_

Sam gave her a lip biting smile, grimacing a little at her own nervousness. “Good to know.”

“What job is it?” _[Smooth attempt at emotional passivity. Almost convincing.]_

“They’re starting trials on new pediatric asthma treatments.”

Her heart fluttered a little at the thought of Sam monitoring pediatric trials. Alana felt primally stupid for it. “Oh, one of the injectables?

It was funny to discuss the meat of the job so frankly, given that it was so entirely not the point of the conversation. Sam responded anyway, “yeah, the non-steroid. It’s kind of scary. I won’t meet the kids ever, probably, but it feels so fragile.

“So no bacteria in your dark office.” _[Okay, back to flirtation.]_

Sam offered a fake pout. “I’m working with allergens, so I will still get to turn all the lights off and look through a microscope.”

“Bacteria will have to be on your own time.”

“Yeah.” Sam pursed her lips and looked through one eye. “So. That’s a ‘yes’ on waiting and seeing?”

“Definitely.”

They both tried to train their grins a little.

“Good, uh, good.”

Despite the positive results of the uncomfortable conversation, they ate their light lunches in a mostly dragging quiet. Uncertainty would always be an outcome of change.

  
  


\----***----

  
  


Will ran a nervous Abigail through the dog-parent-on-a-commercial-flight drill and, once again, they headed to Europe on a red eye. It wasn’t getting less intense, but the reward was so much more sweet this time. As would be the sleep after this trip. 

  
  
  


It was a surprisingly short train ride from Milan to their bus station in the Alps.

The area around Grenoble was crisply gray and raining hard when they arrived. Their place was in the hills, tucked in where the road wound and slimmed and grew lined with different pines. The needles on the deeper shade trees hung down in a ghostly way. Peeking through the gaps between them, it was possible to spot some cow fields and sluggish goats. It certainly wouldn’t be cozy to walk through the fields here in the dark, with the land so decorated with depressed branches. _[Though, statistically, we are probably the only things around here that go bump in the night.]_

The farm house was white and purely rectangular, no complicated exterior design to hint at any purpose beyond utility. It was beautiful though: stucco, two stories, muddled windows, partially broken clay shingle roof. It was half-wrapped with a hobbledy brick stone fence covered in moss. Strong despite its visible age, no suggestion of falling apart. Firewood stacked against the exterior wall would need time to dehydrate again indoors. 

The place seemed very much like what some parallel life path of Hannibal would buy, but not that Baltimore version of him who Will had half-met. Will wondered how many of these life tracks the man had. Not just legal identities, but how many inhabitable truths. If a beast has several costumes, when might one know they’ve met the beast? Is a shapeshifter the sum of its component parts?

Will recalled: _[“what isn’t copied.”]_

He tried to observe more of their surroundings. The home in the hills was close enough to the university that it would only be an hour walk on a clear day, close enough to town to have friends (but far enough to have no stoplights or the ego of old architecture and ski resorts). The backyard was big and stretched into high bushes and slender pine woods. Very steep. It would keep them fit. 

Apparently, it was still the part of the year that was swept with chill, especially at this altitude - a touch that felt beautifully clean and generous after their swamp adventures.

Hannibal’s friend _[?]_ Mona dropped off an excited Winston, who made a beeline for Will’s feet, followed shortly by a thorough investigation of Elijah. A nice little pair they made: a retriever mixed with something and something, a rottweiler mixed with something and something.

The three of them made their way around the house, pulling sheets off of surprisingly comfortable looking furniture, and admiring the soft-spoken details like the exposed brick and narrow staircase. It would quickly become them and remain them.

As they looked through the second floor study and bedrooms, Abigail whipped around with a faux innocence and asked, “oh, where’s your room, Will?”

Hannibal gave him a teasing smile, as though asking him the same question.

_[So we’re picking teams, I see.]_

\----***----

_“–yawned in the fantasy of our strength. And fantasy it was, for we were not strong, only aggressive; we were not free, merely licensed; we were not compassionate, we were polite; not good, but well behaved. We courted death in order to call ourselves brave, and hid like thieves from life. We substituted good grammar for intellect; we switched habits to simulate maturity; we rearranged lies and called it truth, seeing in the new pattern of an old idea the Revelation and the Word.”_

  
  


Hannibal’s hand stretched out over the open book to lower it. “A good place as any to stop.”

They studied each other.

“I’m comfortable here.” Will perched on his elbow to look at him. “I finally feel like I can sleep for the first time. It doesn’t have undertones of guilt or self-imposed uncertainty.” It was true enough.

“It will be new for me as well. To not share a bed with a chronically uncertain Will Graham.” Hannibal smirked while he trailed his fingertips along the other’s brow.

Will frowned back, trying to mask small amused humor. “Is that the rent I will pay here? Tolerating your ridicule?”

Hannibal looked at him with something close to affectionate solemnity. “I am afraid it would take quite the separatist movement for you to walk away now.”

They shared a smile and scooted closer to one another.

“History documentaries would be made about it.”

Hannibal didn’t crack a smile at the joke, but rumbled on, “if we were apart, I would have difficulty conjuring up that outcome. It seems rather impossible to even be interrupted from one another. There isn’t a vice strong enough to cope with that.”

Will chuckled through a grimace. The thought was a little horrible. “I can’t… put the thought of you down. It’s not in my grip. I… wear it. I wear you.” _[The most honest confession of emotional reality. Simpler terms are deceptively healthy.]_

“So, where does that leave us, Will?” It came whispered.

Will rolled onto his back and watched the ceiling before answering, “certainly not anywhere else. Doomed to each other.”

Hannibal turned onto his side and slid a hand along Will’s flank. “I would say ‘fated’, but that is much the same thing.”

Will craned his neck to watch the movement. “So smooth. Dr. Lecter, are you trying to seduce me?” _[Jokes I make in France, apparently.]_

“Are you appreciating all of my efforts?” Hannibal tugged up his t-shirt and splayed his hands around his torso, his fingers denting into the other’s skin.

Will’s eyes tracked the rapid change. “So enamored with my stomach.” _[Sometimes the worship makes a man feel preyed upon.] [I’ve probably also seen ‘Temple of Doom’ too many times. Not everyone wants to reach into men like clay.]_

Hannibal placed a kiss above his navel. “The gut has the most of our own tissue.”

“We’re still mostly foreign cells there. Outnumbered in our own house.” Will closed his eyes. “The noise of the body.”

“Where we feel a lot of our love in the visceral way.” Hannibal placed his head down on him and closed his eyes, too.

“Love… and all of its similar hungers.” Will wondered if Hannibal put his ear to his stomach to listen to his digestion. There definitely wasn’t any actual poetry going on in there.

But there was the carving trail of the fingertips again. Hannibal was speaking lower now. “We are all enamored with the gut, even if we are unaware of the fact. Freezing weather makes the person fold over themselves, huddling together to protect these organs.”

The younger man blew out a little air at their flips between the metaphorical and the physical. Blurs. “Gotta look after our life giving assets.”

“Keeping our hungers warm.”

When Will opened his eyes again, he looked down to see a faint, sharp-toothed smile.

\----***----

Will came downstairs to two very excited dogs. They’ve probably had quite the morning full of new and interesting smells. He called into the kitchen, “who do I have to sleep with to get a cup of coffee around here?”

Hannibal, who was decked out in boots and a windbreaker from a different decade, popped out from behind the empty refrigerator’s door. “I have already prepared some, but I do accept tips.” His hands were occupied by one sudsy and one dry rag, and his elbow jutted out to point toward the mug next to the tablet. “I thought you also might like to read something to start your day off properly.”

Will pressed the screen-on button and was jarred awake by a poisonous white and red page. “Uh, TattleCrime, really?” _[I’m not a type-A narcissist like you.]_

Hannibal looked over his shoulder. “Humor me.”

The short piece was labeled as “BREAKING” for the site’s tab system.

  
*

_Viciously Attacked!_

_I was out doing my journalistic due-diligence, chasing any new developments on the Graham-Lecter story when an unidentified snooper (pictured below) attacked me! Ever heard of freedom of the press? I will not be intimidated out of finding the truth, especially not by Will Graham’s backwoods security system._

*  
  


He laughed too loudly for his energy level.

“You were right. That was a great way to start my day. I wish I could send Sam a fruit basket.” Will sipped the cup. “Talked to Abigail yet?”

“I had the same impulse.” Hannibal abandoned his cleaning for the time being and set his rags down on the edge of a very context-appropriate metal basin. “Jet lag confused her system. I expect she will probably waddle in hours from now.”

Will’s eyes flicked over to the dogs, who were either mesmerized by their shadows on the far wall or had found religion. “So we should leave a note, go grab more than just these train station essentials, and see if your car runs by some miracle.”

“Yes. I lent it out to a friend a few months ago, so it may just need some air in the tires and gas.” Hannibal dug through the drawer and found a legal pad and an old pencil to start on the note. “I will look for chicken and oatmeal for the dogs. Eggs, noodles, and produce for the humans.”

  
  
  


\----***----

A few days into their time there (filled with clothes and food shopping, house cleaning, and car repairs), they were overdue to start socially acclimating. Hannibal was invited to schmooze with his former and future colleagues at a small department event; it was suggested to be “casual attire”, but Will took the other man’s European advice and polished himself much more than he would have otherwise. It raises fewer flags to peacock than it does when a person lurks in the shadows of mandatory gatherings. It would also raise fewer flags if Will didn’t forever look like Hannibal just befriended his golf caddy.

As to be expected, Abigail pleaded to explore the downtown Grenoble area and skip the (without a doubt) night of pallid conversation. Will and Hannibal managed to convince her to leash the dogs and take them with her. At least that would keep her out of bars. (They were horrified enough when she mentioned her interrupted plans to attend New Orleans mardi gras.) She accepted the offer and so did the two tiny carnivores.

  
  
  
  


Thankfully, the hall for the event didn’t scream “gala” as much as it did “stuffy business party”, which was a welcome alternative.

“Bonsoir monsieur Gabriel.” 

Will looked to his right and was greeted by a very tall, round eyed, round nose, big cheeked blonde. “Bonsoir…”

“Simone Gaillard, ah, well newly Simone Marino.” She wiggled her twinkling left ring finger.

“Oh, congratulations.” _[I forget my new name, too.]_

She set her hand very briefly on his shoulder in thanks. “I’m a student here. You are with Professor Abreo, is that right?”

He flicked his eyes unsuccessfully around the room. “Yes, my partner. Are you in the art school?”

“Ah, no.” She softly smiled. “I am pursuing a master diploma in cognition and the professor pointed me in your direction.”

Will wanted to laugh at that. Most of Hannibal’s kindnesses also felt like being pranked. “He did?”

“He tells us you were a psychology professor in the States. ‘Brilliant’ as he put it.” Her accent tugged around her words a little.

Will physically paused his champagne _[‘for real this time’ champagne]_ drinking to consider that. He always thought of himself as smart in a chessboard way, but he suspected most people saw his particular wit as something closer to that of the little boy in _Sixth Sense_. “Yes, just for a short bit. I have my master’s in the field, though.”

“I should have been more forthcoming.” She put a gentle hand over her own heart. “I am looking for a mentor through my research and, as much as Western Europe would love to see our tourist towns as bustling areas, I’ve not had so much luck finding someone.”

He studied her a moment. For all of her conversational grace, she stood out as shockingly genuine. “Well, unless you’re writing your findings in entry level Louisiana Creole, I can’t help you with your presentations.” It was true, but Will tacked on a smile that made the comment seem closer to a joke than the self deprecation that it was.

Simone laughed in a large way. “No, no. I appreciate the humility, but I am looking for a research direction in general. Mentor-ship is a formal, though small, position with the faculty. Besides, we are in the Alps. It’s fitting that you know a little of a few languages.” She gave him a near wink.

He struggled to understand what was happening. _[What is this? Speed dating for employment?]_ “So you’re helping me find a job?”

Simone flushed. “Is that rude?” Her fine posture deflated in a subtle way.

 _[They have speed dating for employment, Graham, it’s called job fairs and networking events, you ass.]_ Will made a mental note to wear large, thick framed glasses the next one of these things. “It’s very kind. I would love to…” _[learn more about how the hell that works here.]_

Her deflation reversed. “Great. I’m glad to hear it. As I know you are just settling into the area, would it be alright if I reached out through your partner? Just for the time being?”

 _[Ah, polite society. With all its permissions and gentle touches.]_ “Unless you have good command of carrier pigeons.”

That earned a dulcet chuckle. “I don’t, tragique.” She mimed linking elbows with him. “Come. I will socially release you back into familiar arms.”

 _[Oh thank Christ.]_ They approached a circle of laughing art history faculty members. _[Hmm. Maybe hiding in the bathroom would be more familiar.]_

Hannibal turned over his shoulder to spot Will – and Simone used the shift to sneak out of the room. 

“Oh, you must be René! From the United States!” A man threw out both of his hands to grip both of Will’s. His nose was swollen with a lifetime of daily drinking and his lips were red with a night of the same. The only word that came to mind to describe him was… jolly.

“Yes, hello.” Will tried to appear comfortable with himself, the company, and the situation, but it was just such a tall order for his performance abilities. “You are?”

“Henri Chevalier. Nice to meet you.” His eyes were glinting with a calmer sort of warmth, which in turn made his general demeanor more passable in this corner of academia.

Before Will had to dive back into his mental small talk reserves, Hannibal rescued him. “Our daughter is looking to start here in the fall if possible. At least hoping to sit in on English lectures.”

The man lit up at the both of them. “Ah, strings are made to be pulled, Isaac. You’ve raised a teenager in the time you’ve been away? Has it been that long?”

Hannibal unfolded into an even prouder posture – old habits – and gave a demure grin. “It _has_ been nearly that long, unfortunately, but she is René’s.” He indicated Will by placing a hand on his lower back. “Not my own by law or blood but, by all the worthy metrics, Rose is very much the both of ours.”

Will nodded, though he was provided with the treacherous thought: _[or she is no one’s.]_ He felt the subtle gesture on his lower back tense minutely.

“If you will excuse us for a moment, we must freshen these drinks.” Hannibal nodded to them and retreated with Will to the bar.

  
  


At the bar, Will surprised himself by being the first one to speak. “Well we’re dressed nice and in public… so this is sort of our first date.” He stopped himself from joking: _[and we’re both the type to put out on a first date.]_

The older man heard the thought anyway. “Hmm. I suppose you’re right. Reviews?”

Will shrugged and looked down into the bubbling drink. “Simone Marino offered to link me with a formal mentor position. I didn’t know those were actual faculty spots.”

Hannibal hummed in confirmation. “At certain universities, yes. It might be leveraged into a future lecturer position.”

“We’ll see.” He turned to face him. “But, to answer your question: mixed reviews. I wish we were dozing off by the fire in our new place.”

That got a brow raised. “Sleepy or sentimental?”

“If I say ‘sleepy’, will it hurt your feelings?” Will smiled down to the floor. He was pulled in by the elbow.

“Come closer so that I may whisper something salacious to you.” Hannibal nearly touched his lips to Will’s ear before speaking. “I did not tidy before we left Baltimore. In fact, I left a rather big mess in the cold storage.”

Will’s face drained and he pushed back to stare at the man incredulously. “You’re talking about Baltimore? Your buyers are set to move in next month.”

“Kabuki.” Hannibal smirked while his head tilted in curiosity. “Your heart is pounding. What does this change beyond your reputation?”

“For an appetizer: we’ll be hunted internationally.” Will had to imagine himself coiled in wire in order to not flail his hands like he wanted so badly to do. “Oh, you love the thrill of your taunt, but this is stupidly dangerous.”

Hannibal sipped from his burgundy. “We’ve already fled. That in itself is an admission of guilt.”

 _[I’m gonna punch him right here in front of his colleagues.]_ “Not an admission of _ripping_ ,” Will gritted out.

Hannibal looked at his exasperation with a completely calm and whimsical gaze. “Now it is.”

A large ‘why?’ ran across Will’s face, “It was enough of a commitment for me to sell my house and re-home my dogs, you didn’t need to seal the hatch behind me.” _[Or throw a lit match in first.]_

Hannibal ran his knuckles down Will’s cheek. “Yes I did.”

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *elliot page voice* "I am here today... because I am gay"  
> Here are some of my paintings:  
> [Sam](https://jaydeclan.tumblr.com/post/643418421405564928/alternatives-to-samina-character-drawings)  
> [the scrambled eggs scene](https://jaydeclan.tumblr.com/post/643036637821124608/how-do-you-see-me-the-mongoose-i-want)


End file.
